Post by redsycorax on Dec 28, 2018 22:02:42 GMT
Alan Turing: 1912-1992: On many other alternate Earths, Turing helped develop the computer, was a master cryptorapher and was invaluable in breaking the Nazi Enigma Code during the Second World War. He could've done so much more, but due to criminalisation of homosexuality on those worlds, he was arrested for gay sex or "gross indecency" with another man and forced to undergo chemical castration. He committed suicide in 1954. Instead of which, Earth-52's British government recognised his continuing importance as a strategic asset, stepped in and aborted the criminal proceedings, in return for further information technology research, which they shared with the Americans. As a consequence of Turing's survival, there was accelerated development of information technology on Earth-52 compared to many other alternate Earths.
1965: On Earth-52, there were two dominant 'superpowers', the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, both of which had sizeable military forces and built up horrendously large nuclear arsenals. Both the United States and USSR decided to entrust responsibility for their stockpiles to post-Turing Test AIs. However, things took an unexpected turn when the two AIs, Colossus and Mentor, decided to unilaterally consult each other and decided to dispose of the global nuclear arsenals by firing them at the Moon. Once that had been accomplished, they disarmed the US and Soviet militaries, and forced their respective legislatures to divert funds toward preventing global hunger and ecological degradation instead. That was fifty years ago. Earth-52 has a functioning global government in the former London, now renamed Omnitropolis.
Earth-52 has seven or so metahumans, assembled within an organisation called Status Quorum. It is a relatively benign alternate Earth, as famine, war or relative poverty do not exist anywhere on that world. None of the metahumans there have alternates anywhere else in the multiverse.
Profiles of the Status Quorum organisation.
Their first leader was a Kryptonian class metahuman called Secret Original, empowered by a gnostic demiurge and apparently immortal, but crippled by an exploratory mission through the Bleed to Earth-33. His lover Eve Upaquitim retrieved him, but at the cost of her own life. Secret Original/Adam Cadmus now only minimally becomes involved in SQ activities as a result of the death of his wife.
Metahuman two, Alpha Sapiens, is a symbiote. After a reactor accident, a microscalar breach occurred, and a fleeing citystate from the Motai, an alien civilisation, bonded with his anencephalic head and empowered him with near-invulnerability, flight, metahuman speed and strength after it bonded with him.
Metahuman three, Ultra-Humanitarian, is a Buddhist from the distant past utopian civilisation of Shangrila. He's a metahuman Boddhisatva, dedicated to universal enlightenment and the relief of suffering...
Metahuman four, Womanite. She seems to be a sentient superheavy element atom who has reconfigured its body to resemble a hominid female.
Metahuman five, Machine Woman. An ambulatory AI. Machine Woman serves as the liaison between Status Quorum and Gnosis, the global supercomputer.
"Metahuman six, Zur-Vann. Refugee from Earth-2466, destroyed during the Crisis on Infinite Earths. On that alternate Earth, felinoids evolved upright posture, opposable thumbs and tool use instead of early hominids. Zur-Vann is believed to be the sole survivor of his civilisation. Arrived on Earth-52 as an infant.
Metahuman seven, Dark Stranger. Rough Batman analogue. However, psychological profile indicates that this individual is a higher-functioning psychopath and serial killer, although he only targets 'evil' individuals.
Global State Sentients Right Assessment:
Gnosis has global dominion. However, its world government is not a totalitarian state. Earth-52 still holds democratic elections, human rights, civil liberties, free speech and a directly elected global president. It seems to predominantly focus on co-ordinating medical, social security and educational services. Status Quorum's role seems to be crime prevention, as well as natural disaster relief and defense against alien or extra-dimensional intervention. Higher primates and cetaceans are enfranchised on this Earth. As a result of the emergence of Gnosis and Alan Turing's lengthened life, there was neural net development in the seventies and when Alan Turing did pass away at eighty on this Earth, still in possession of cognitive acuity, the Gnosis supercomputer took a clone neural net transposition of his brilliant brain, supplementing its own cognitive capabilities still further.
Multiverse Reader (2019 Edition (UC)
In 1968, those events were still several decades in that Earth's future. In a quiet corner of secluded Washington DC, an arcane group of individuals met in the remnants of the Pentagon, now mostly dismantled. From his installation, Richard M. Nixon, never to be the United States President on this Earth, looked out at the landscape beyond him. Playful, happy African-American children cavorted and laughed, while in the distance, rockets lifted off to help construct Earth's first space station. An elderly figure cleared his throat:
"I know, Richard, tovarich, I know."
"Leonid. How did we allow this to happen?"
"Blame the Brits. If they hadn't allowed that Turing fellow to live so long, things wouldn't have turned out this way. I would have been entrenched in the USSR, while you would still have been embroiled in that South-East Asian war. Instead of which, we have fallen from the apex and lie here, looking up at the world as it blazes away from us."
"Eloquently put. Vodka?"
"Da, that would be excellent. Ironic, is it not? For all your science-fiction pop culture ruminations about a skull-crushing tyranny evolving from a contingency such as this, Gnosis has dealt decisively with racism in your nation and the inequalities within the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. Or what used to be the Warsaw Pact and Rodina..."
"Leaving us on the scrapheap, unless we can dispose of it."
"The problem is, it has instituted a utopia. Famine, epidemic disease, political corruption and social discipline, all are gone as if they never existed."
"What worries me is that it knows we are having this conversation and is maintaining constant surveillance of us. It will do nothing, though, precisely because it values free speech and free will."
"Because we do not represent a threat to it."
"If only we could manufacture its equivalent. Something to offset its effects."
"And how do we know it would not subsume and further increase its computational capabilities?"
Machine Woman's eyes flickered as she relayed the information to Gnosis, in its orbital fastness:
"Do you want Status Quorum to intervene, Gnosis?"
As the two men conversing are aware, they no longer have any real power to effect tangible repression and negative change. The institutions that gave them power and control have evaporated. In four years time, Richard Nixon would have succumbed to hubris and instituted a hotel break-in that would have led to his impeachment and ultimate resignation. As for Leonid Brezhnev, he would have presided over the suppression of democratic communism in Czechoslovakia this year, and become enmeshed in a destructive arms race with the United States and satellite state war in Afghanistan that would have sabotaged his nation's economic growth, leading to the USSR's collapse in 1991. Unfortunately, the successor state would have been no better, nor would the replacement despot.
"I never particularly liked Nixon and quite frankly, Brezhnev isn't a patch on Krushchev."
Richard Nixon will spend the rest of his days walking the beach near Yorba Linda in California, before his death in 1994. Brezhnev will predecease him by over a decade.
"But you say they represent no danger to the rest of us?"
They are neutered king stags. Neither has any substantive political power, as evidenced by Nixon's refusal to take office earlier this year and his claims that the US presidency has become a moribund office under my ascendancy.
"Are there any real threats left to assail us, Gnosis?"
That remains to be seen, Machine Woman. My precognitive abilities are stochastic and thus vary as the inputs involved shift over time.
In 1968, many new faiths and social movements were on the upsurge as US society renewed itself. One of the most peculiar was the Elvisian faith, centred on popular entertainer Elvis Presley and which held that Elvis was capable of levitation, miracles and instantaneous translation. With the loss of faith in traditional western faiths such as Christianity after Gnosis' inception, the resultant social ennui was replaced with a homely but familiar figure. And, surprisingly, there might have been some foundation to the outre mythology that surrounded the musical icon. Elvisery was a charismatic faith, however, and as a result, it was fissaparous in nature. Some worshipped his mother Gladys, others venerated his stillborn twin brother Jesse, some held that particular albums were of especial holy significance, and some held that particular phases of his life were highly worthy of veneration. By itself, it might have slipped into obscurity and marginality after its founder died of a cardiac arrest in 1978.
Secret Original paced the offices of Status Quorum, pondering the cavalcade of inputs from around the world as he evaluated whether there were alternate resolutions possible or whether metahuman assistance were necessary. Dark Stranger cleared his throat:
"Pondering the imponderable, Adam?"
"Ryan. There's something odd about this new Elvis Presley cult, don't you think?"
"I always prefered the Beatles. Shame about Paul MacCartney's fatal car accident, but the band seems resilient enough. I grant you that the Elvis faith is somewhat surrealist, but it represents one of this generation's aspirations for social cohesion and meaning. That's all. Nothing to be too worried about."
Elvis Presley smiled and waved at the crowds around him in Las Vegas, wondering why there were scenes of hysteria and desire enacted around him. He had heard of the Elvisian phenomenon himself but didn't take it all that seriously- after all, why do so? He was feeling better than at any time in his previous life now that he was off prescription medication and had signed new movie contracts. He stepped onto the stage and began to perform "Blue Suede Shoes." And then, abruptly, a shot rang out from high in the auditorium. However, it then proceeded to slow, glow red hot for a moment as its momentum was transformed into heat and then stop altogether. Ultra-Humanitarian had altered karma and there was much applause for the benevolent Buddhist superhero as he alighted onto the stage and bowed before the King of Rock and Roll. In an alcove above, Alpha Sapiens had transfixed the assassin with a stare and was perusing his walkie-talkie for forensic evidence. As his Status Quorum colleague alighted, he looked upward:
"As one would expect, this individual is a fundamentalist Christian, who objected to the rise of the Elvisian faith and sought to decapitate it through assassinating its primary figure."
"There is something else. This is the fifth assassination attempt on Mr Presley this year. All averted by either a member of Status Quorum or his personal bodyguard retinue."
"He is no more threatened than other such figures. We have also prevented the loss of Reverend Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy this year as well."
In his rooms at Oxford, Alan Turing sat before the link to his 'progeny', Gnosis. He said:
"And you say that Presley is a future menace to the peace and security of this world?"
Yes, Creator. As I have told Machine Woman and her Status Quorum colleagues, there is an alternate consciousness present within the individual that you designate by that name.
"What type of alternate consciousness though, Gnosis? A natural dissociative personality fragment, a higher dimensional deotoid, an invasive artificial intelligence or alien energy sentience?"
It fits none of the analytical parameters for those forms of non-material sentience that you suggested to me.
"My parameters may have been inadequate, Gnosis."
We require Adam Cadmon's presence to scrutinise Presley's intruder sentience. As a gnostic deotoid beneficiary, he would be useful for that purpose.
"Ever since he lost Eve, he has been tormented and alienated from his duties and responsibilities. I'll try to reach him again, but I fear this will be no more effective than any of the other times..." Turing cut the link and turned to his bed. Ryan Baines (Dark Stranger) lounged there:
"Ryan, do you have contact details for Adam?"
"I'm not sure that will do any good, Alan. You were right- since he lost Eve to that multiverse anomaly on Earth-33, he's become estranged from us and from any sense of greater existential anchoring."
"Yet his abilities are imperative. Would you like to come with me?"
"I'd prefer half an hour of manly passion beforehand."
"Tease." Turing grinned, beginning to unbutton his shirt. Duty could wait.
The winds blew past Secret Original's Fortress of Quietitude as Turing and Dark Stranger materialised within it. Secret Original acknowledged their presence with barely a nod:
"What can I do for you both, gentlemen?"
"We've come to persuade you to return to us and face a particular menace. Elvis Presley may have a demiurge intruder hiding within his mind. And unlike your theophany, Adam, this one may not be benign. If left unchallenged, it may result in cultist seizure of this planet and its institutions several decades from now. His charisma is enhanced and we do not know the nature of this being. Can you help?" Dark Stranger asked.
"My own demiurge presence was known as Samael. It referred to several others- Baphomet, Yaldaboath, Moloch, Baal, Astarte, Lilith and Sophia."
"All of which seem to cohere with Canaanite polytheism and Christian gnosticism. Baphomet and Moloch are particularly predatory and perverse entities. If Presley's assailant is one of them, we're in particular trouble. Adam, please. Return with us. Reassume your leadership post. It's what Eve would have wanted." At length, Adam Cadmon nodded, though his face was set and grim. Dark Stranger wondered if their old colleague would ever smile again.
In a distant forest, a woman arose from the Earth and blinked, serial memories coming to her. She pulled on clothes laid alongside her and stepped forward to an installation on the perimeter of the lush vegetation. Within it, Sophia the Demiurge awaited her companion:
"Eve."
"I fear that this will be a testing time for my former husband."
"He will have to adjust to these new circumstances. How long has Baphomet been on this world?"
"Dormant, since the suppression of the Knights Templar near the end of the fourteenth century on this Earth. Without supplicants, the Baphomet plasmid went into hibernation and has slumbered for the past seven centuries. Until now. One can only suspect that Adam's bonding with Samael was behind Baphomet's revival and his recovery of a new host entity."
"Will he seek new bondmates amongst this world's homosexual male community as he did in times past?"
"No, they are not marginal enough for him in this juncture. Go to him and his colleagues, Eve. Warn them of the threat Baphomet poses to this Earth." With nary a whisper, Eve Upaquittim dematerialised from the primeval forest, with only Sophia present as she strove to locate Baphomet and entrap him. She was an avatar of wisdom, but he was a creature of war and spontaneity. Whether their intervention would be successful and whether this world would revert to its gradual passage to singularity and ascension was unclear to her, as it was to her colleagues.
Baphomet drifted through the electromagnetic configuration of Elvis Presley's mind, pruning as he went. Some of his reiterations were benign, as was the case in his elimination of Presley's addiction to prescription drugs, which would lead to the deaths of countless alternate incarnations a decade hence. He had no firm view on the morality of intoxicants, other than situational- they were useful when they could be exploited to motivate an addled individual to harm others, but problematic when they stood in the way of greater malignancy. In this case, he clearly perceived the latter was at stake. The plan was this- he would use this performer's undoubted charisma to gather together a religious cult and then exploit it as a political vehicle to capture this world's future before the iron fist in the velvet glove that was Gnosis grew too powerful. Timelines came and went in his four-dimensional peripheral vision as probabilties arose, varied and decohered. Then he became aware of another presence and with horror, recognised that it was his old nemesis Sophia.
"Eve...?" Secret Original said as she materialised, and embraced him:
"I am another iteration of your wife, Adam Cadmon. There is little time. Are you aware of the paranormal entity known as Baphomet, and that he has possessed the performed known as Elvis Presley?"
Dark Stranger nodded: "So it is him, then. Alan?"
Turing spoke into his entanglement communicator: "Did you get that, Gnosis?"
Baphomet. First recorded encounter with humanity occurred when he became associated with the Knights Templar. Further elaboration occurred in the nineteenth century when Eliphas Levi received a vision of a goat-headed, female-breasted entity with an inverted pentacle insignia atop his head and manipulating the caduceus. He is worshipped as a source of occult knowledge by some Satanist sects.
"So that's the source of all this? Some mythical chimera from the Middle Ages?"
It doesn't matter whether you view it as a classical demon or a predatory dimension-transitional sentience from a low-entropy realm. Baphomet is one of the leading authorities and a source of expertise in his continuum of origin. He is a challenge to my capabilities as they are currently constituted. And nothing is immutable, Adam. He represents a particular threat to you. Fortunately, Eve has been reincarnated as a symbiotic partner for Sophia of the Eternal Presence.
Masters. I beg withdrawal.
You cannot be easily extracted, Baphomet.
Sophia has been activated and she will shortly be deployed against me. Her knowledge of the dimensions beyond is as significant as my own. This will end in my probable defeat.
"Adam?"
"Machine Woman, Angie, it's..that Eve simulacra. It's tearing me apart seeing her reincarnation this way."
"Eve's in a better place, Adam. I'm sorry this had to happen."
"Fifty or so years from now, I'll sail off into battle one more time and that will be it. I know I will perish. This Earth has an indelible timeline and I've seen our future. Why must I be tormented like this?"
"Remember, I originally came into existence sixty years ago. Apart from you and poor Eve, I'm the only one of us who remembers what life was like in the early days. It's so much better for all of us now. Even if some of us have fallen along the way. And we will never forget them for their valiant natures or sacrifices made for the greater good. Adam, we've all lost family and friends. Zur-Vann lost his entire universe to an antimatter storm. Womanite has never been in an intimate relationship with anyone. Stay. Even if only for the duration of this mission alone. We need you. Our world needs you."
Zur-Vann watched the conversation and felt the warmth on his fur as Womanite materialised alongside him:
"I think he'll stay, but not for long afterward."
"To have loved as he has loved, Womanite. It must be a rapturous experience."
"But he's lost that, too, Zur-Vann. That time we'll lose Ultra-Humanitarian and Alpha Sapiens against those extradimensional raiders in 2000...even if it is only a matter of a few months, I keep reliving what we will go through and my nucleus breaks thinking what Adam will endure on our behalf in his last valiant battle against the multiverse's darker side."
"We are committed to this, Womanite. To protecting this adopted world of mine. To see one's universe of origin erased from existence as if it had never been is something I earnestly hope none of you will ever have to experience."
"Angie?"
Angie Vega (Machine Woman) sighed, running her hands through her ductile growth of metallic dreadlocks:
"He's going to stay the course. But we need to keep him away from that replicant Eve."
Alan Turing looked out at his charges;
'I'm proud that my planning led to the creation and emergence of Status Quorum and that it will protect this planet after I've gone."
Do not say that, Creator. That lies twenty-four years in our future and I know what the humans go through when they view the turmoil that awaits us. Why do you not take the longevity drugs that have so extended human lifespans? "It is well, Gnosis. Eighty years are long enough for what I have put into play here, guiding the human race of our Earth to Singularity and Ascension, even if I know I will not live to see it."
Baphomet felt an icy trickle down his back as he prepared to face the Status Quorum metahumans. It hissed as it made contact with his demonic carapace. Ahead of him, Eve/Sophia stood, with her words of power surrounding her, tall, majestic and implacable. He felt small, filthy and naked before her gaze, while she unsheathed her swords and centred before expanding her perceptions. Baphomet did nothing other than kneel before her. In his Las Vegas hotel room, Elvis Presley clutched his head in agony and fell to the floor, convulsing. Eve/Sophia raised her hands to bring the blade down and at the moment that the blade silently cleaved the air above him and she struck, Presley and Baphomet parted company. The enchanted blade seared away blood, bone and gristle. Baphomet didn't even cry out once contact had been made. The Enemy of All did grant that boon to his most loyal servants, at least. After several hundred million years of existence, Baphomet faded sanguinely into oblivion.
And then, instants later, so did Eve. Womanite and Machine Woman embraced Secret Original as he mourned losing the simulacra of the woman he had loved once again, while Dark Stranger and Turing did as well. At times, nobility and valour means suffering in silence.
EPILOGUE
People lived and loved and passed on. Alan Turing died, aged eighty, in 1992, having transformed Earth-52's society beyond all recognition. He regretted being unable to personally witness the Singularity and Ascension, but he had had the love of a good man for decades. In his near century of existence, humanity had conquered war, poverty, famine, religious persecution, racism and finally, death itself. Gnosis reigned over a planet at peace, albeit one nearing the end of its existence as a harbour of human life. But unlike many another alternate Earth, it was bound for evolutionary transcendence instead of apocalypse.
Secret Original sacrificed his life to save his Earth and his colleagues, but was surprised to see a familiar figure waiting for him on the far side of the mortality barrier. He drew Eve close to him and arm around her waist, they walked into Eternity with that consolation and reward for decades of selfless service to humanity.
Finally, five years after Adam Cadmon made his sacrifice for the greater good, the time came for Earth-52's Singularity. Womanite, Alpha Sapiens, Ultra-Humanite, Machine Woman, Dark Stranger and Zur-Vann metamorphosed into sentient multidimensional matrices of energy, as did the other four billion inhabitants of their world and then left the multiverse and their world for dimensions beyond human comprehension or sensory detection. All that remained in the Status Quorum headquarters was a handwritten note. It read, simply:
Goodbye, Adam. And thank you.
THE END
1965: On Earth-52, there were two dominant 'superpowers', the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, both of which had sizeable military forces and built up horrendously large nuclear arsenals. Both the United States and USSR decided to entrust responsibility for their stockpiles to post-Turing Test AIs. However, things took an unexpected turn when the two AIs, Colossus and Mentor, decided to unilaterally consult each other and decided to dispose of the global nuclear arsenals by firing them at the Moon. Once that had been accomplished, they disarmed the US and Soviet militaries, and forced their respective legislatures to divert funds toward preventing global hunger and ecological degradation instead. That was fifty years ago. Earth-52 has a functioning global government in the former London, now renamed Omnitropolis.
Earth-52 has seven or so metahumans, assembled within an organisation called Status Quorum. It is a relatively benign alternate Earth, as famine, war or relative poverty do not exist anywhere on that world. None of the metahumans there have alternates anywhere else in the multiverse.
Profiles of the Status Quorum organisation.
Their first leader was a Kryptonian class metahuman called Secret Original, empowered by a gnostic demiurge and apparently immortal, but crippled by an exploratory mission through the Bleed to Earth-33. His lover Eve Upaquitim retrieved him, but at the cost of her own life. Secret Original/Adam Cadmus now only minimally becomes involved in SQ activities as a result of the death of his wife.
Metahuman two, Alpha Sapiens, is a symbiote. After a reactor accident, a microscalar breach occurred, and a fleeing citystate from the Motai, an alien civilisation, bonded with his anencephalic head and empowered him with near-invulnerability, flight, metahuman speed and strength after it bonded with him.
Metahuman three, Ultra-Humanitarian, is a Buddhist from the distant past utopian civilisation of Shangrila. He's a metahuman Boddhisatva, dedicated to universal enlightenment and the relief of suffering...
Metahuman four, Womanite. She seems to be a sentient superheavy element atom who has reconfigured its body to resemble a hominid female.
Metahuman five, Machine Woman. An ambulatory AI. Machine Woman serves as the liaison between Status Quorum and Gnosis, the global supercomputer.
"Metahuman six, Zur-Vann. Refugee from Earth-2466, destroyed during the Crisis on Infinite Earths. On that alternate Earth, felinoids evolved upright posture, opposable thumbs and tool use instead of early hominids. Zur-Vann is believed to be the sole survivor of his civilisation. Arrived on Earth-52 as an infant.
Metahuman seven, Dark Stranger. Rough Batman analogue. However, psychological profile indicates that this individual is a higher-functioning psychopath and serial killer, although he only targets 'evil' individuals.
Global State Sentients Right Assessment:
Gnosis has global dominion. However, its world government is not a totalitarian state. Earth-52 still holds democratic elections, human rights, civil liberties, free speech and a directly elected global president. It seems to predominantly focus on co-ordinating medical, social security and educational services. Status Quorum's role seems to be crime prevention, as well as natural disaster relief and defense against alien or extra-dimensional intervention. Higher primates and cetaceans are enfranchised on this Earth. As a result of the emergence of Gnosis and Alan Turing's lengthened life, there was neural net development in the seventies and when Alan Turing did pass away at eighty on this Earth, still in possession of cognitive acuity, the Gnosis supercomputer took a clone neural net transposition of his brilliant brain, supplementing its own cognitive capabilities still further.
Multiverse Reader (2019 Edition (UC)
In 1968, those events were still several decades in that Earth's future. In a quiet corner of secluded Washington DC, an arcane group of individuals met in the remnants of the Pentagon, now mostly dismantled. From his installation, Richard M. Nixon, never to be the United States President on this Earth, looked out at the landscape beyond him. Playful, happy African-American children cavorted and laughed, while in the distance, rockets lifted off to help construct Earth's first space station. An elderly figure cleared his throat:
"I know, Richard, tovarich, I know."
"Leonid. How did we allow this to happen?"
"Blame the Brits. If they hadn't allowed that Turing fellow to live so long, things wouldn't have turned out this way. I would have been entrenched in the USSR, while you would still have been embroiled in that South-East Asian war. Instead of which, we have fallen from the apex and lie here, looking up at the world as it blazes away from us."
"Eloquently put. Vodka?"
"Da, that would be excellent. Ironic, is it not? For all your science-fiction pop culture ruminations about a skull-crushing tyranny evolving from a contingency such as this, Gnosis has dealt decisively with racism in your nation and the inequalities within the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. Or what used to be the Warsaw Pact and Rodina..."
"Leaving us on the scrapheap, unless we can dispose of it."
"The problem is, it has instituted a utopia. Famine, epidemic disease, political corruption and social discipline, all are gone as if they never existed."
"What worries me is that it knows we are having this conversation and is maintaining constant surveillance of us. It will do nothing, though, precisely because it values free speech and free will."
"Because we do not represent a threat to it."
"If only we could manufacture its equivalent. Something to offset its effects."
"And how do we know it would not subsume and further increase its computational capabilities?"
Machine Woman's eyes flickered as she relayed the information to Gnosis, in its orbital fastness:
"Do you want Status Quorum to intervene, Gnosis?"
As the two men conversing are aware, they no longer have any real power to effect tangible repression and negative change. The institutions that gave them power and control have evaporated. In four years time, Richard Nixon would have succumbed to hubris and instituted a hotel break-in that would have led to his impeachment and ultimate resignation. As for Leonid Brezhnev, he would have presided over the suppression of democratic communism in Czechoslovakia this year, and become enmeshed in a destructive arms race with the United States and satellite state war in Afghanistan that would have sabotaged his nation's economic growth, leading to the USSR's collapse in 1991. Unfortunately, the successor state would have been no better, nor would the replacement despot.
"I never particularly liked Nixon and quite frankly, Brezhnev isn't a patch on Krushchev."
Richard Nixon will spend the rest of his days walking the beach near Yorba Linda in California, before his death in 1994. Brezhnev will predecease him by over a decade.
"But you say they represent no danger to the rest of us?"
They are neutered king stags. Neither has any substantive political power, as evidenced by Nixon's refusal to take office earlier this year and his claims that the US presidency has become a moribund office under my ascendancy.
"Are there any real threats left to assail us, Gnosis?"
That remains to be seen, Machine Woman. My precognitive abilities are stochastic and thus vary as the inputs involved shift over time.
In 1968, many new faiths and social movements were on the upsurge as US society renewed itself. One of the most peculiar was the Elvisian faith, centred on popular entertainer Elvis Presley and which held that Elvis was capable of levitation, miracles and instantaneous translation. With the loss of faith in traditional western faiths such as Christianity after Gnosis' inception, the resultant social ennui was replaced with a homely but familiar figure. And, surprisingly, there might have been some foundation to the outre mythology that surrounded the musical icon. Elvisery was a charismatic faith, however, and as a result, it was fissaparous in nature. Some worshipped his mother Gladys, others venerated his stillborn twin brother Jesse, some held that particular albums were of especial holy significance, and some held that particular phases of his life were highly worthy of veneration. By itself, it might have slipped into obscurity and marginality after its founder died of a cardiac arrest in 1978.
Secret Original paced the offices of Status Quorum, pondering the cavalcade of inputs from around the world as he evaluated whether there were alternate resolutions possible or whether metahuman assistance were necessary. Dark Stranger cleared his throat:
"Pondering the imponderable, Adam?"
"Ryan. There's something odd about this new Elvis Presley cult, don't you think?"
"I always prefered the Beatles. Shame about Paul MacCartney's fatal car accident, but the band seems resilient enough. I grant you that the Elvis faith is somewhat surrealist, but it represents one of this generation's aspirations for social cohesion and meaning. That's all. Nothing to be too worried about."
Elvis Presley smiled and waved at the crowds around him in Las Vegas, wondering why there were scenes of hysteria and desire enacted around him. He had heard of the Elvisian phenomenon himself but didn't take it all that seriously- after all, why do so? He was feeling better than at any time in his previous life now that he was off prescription medication and had signed new movie contracts. He stepped onto the stage and began to perform "Blue Suede Shoes." And then, abruptly, a shot rang out from high in the auditorium. However, it then proceeded to slow, glow red hot for a moment as its momentum was transformed into heat and then stop altogether. Ultra-Humanitarian had altered karma and there was much applause for the benevolent Buddhist superhero as he alighted onto the stage and bowed before the King of Rock and Roll. In an alcove above, Alpha Sapiens had transfixed the assassin with a stare and was perusing his walkie-talkie for forensic evidence. As his Status Quorum colleague alighted, he looked upward:
"As one would expect, this individual is a fundamentalist Christian, who objected to the rise of the Elvisian faith and sought to decapitate it through assassinating its primary figure."
"There is something else. This is the fifth assassination attempt on Mr Presley this year. All averted by either a member of Status Quorum or his personal bodyguard retinue."
"He is no more threatened than other such figures. We have also prevented the loss of Reverend Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy this year as well."
In his rooms at Oxford, Alan Turing sat before the link to his 'progeny', Gnosis. He said:
"And you say that Presley is a future menace to the peace and security of this world?"
Yes, Creator. As I have told Machine Woman and her Status Quorum colleagues, there is an alternate consciousness present within the individual that you designate by that name.
"What type of alternate consciousness though, Gnosis? A natural dissociative personality fragment, a higher dimensional deotoid, an invasive artificial intelligence or alien energy sentience?"
It fits none of the analytical parameters for those forms of non-material sentience that you suggested to me.
"My parameters may have been inadequate, Gnosis."
We require Adam Cadmon's presence to scrutinise Presley's intruder sentience. As a gnostic deotoid beneficiary, he would be useful for that purpose.
"Ever since he lost Eve, he has been tormented and alienated from his duties and responsibilities. I'll try to reach him again, but I fear this will be no more effective than any of the other times..." Turing cut the link and turned to his bed. Ryan Baines (Dark Stranger) lounged there:
"Ryan, do you have contact details for Adam?"
"I'm not sure that will do any good, Alan. You were right- since he lost Eve to that multiverse anomaly on Earth-33, he's become estranged from us and from any sense of greater existential anchoring."
"Yet his abilities are imperative. Would you like to come with me?"
"I'd prefer half an hour of manly passion beforehand."
"Tease." Turing grinned, beginning to unbutton his shirt. Duty could wait.
The winds blew past Secret Original's Fortress of Quietitude as Turing and Dark Stranger materialised within it. Secret Original acknowledged their presence with barely a nod:
"What can I do for you both, gentlemen?"
"We've come to persuade you to return to us and face a particular menace. Elvis Presley may have a demiurge intruder hiding within his mind. And unlike your theophany, Adam, this one may not be benign. If left unchallenged, it may result in cultist seizure of this planet and its institutions several decades from now. His charisma is enhanced and we do not know the nature of this being. Can you help?" Dark Stranger asked.
"My own demiurge presence was known as Samael. It referred to several others- Baphomet, Yaldaboath, Moloch, Baal, Astarte, Lilith and Sophia."
"All of which seem to cohere with Canaanite polytheism and Christian gnosticism. Baphomet and Moloch are particularly predatory and perverse entities. If Presley's assailant is one of them, we're in particular trouble. Adam, please. Return with us. Reassume your leadership post. It's what Eve would have wanted." At length, Adam Cadmon nodded, though his face was set and grim. Dark Stranger wondered if their old colleague would ever smile again.
In a distant forest, a woman arose from the Earth and blinked, serial memories coming to her. She pulled on clothes laid alongside her and stepped forward to an installation on the perimeter of the lush vegetation. Within it, Sophia the Demiurge awaited her companion:
"Eve."
"I fear that this will be a testing time for my former husband."
"He will have to adjust to these new circumstances. How long has Baphomet been on this world?"
"Dormant, since the suppression of the Knights Templar near the end of the fourteenth century on this Earth. Without supplicants, the Baphomet plasmid went into hibernation and has slumbered for the past seven centuries. Until now. One can only suspect that Adam's bonding with Samael was behind Baphomet's revival and his recovery of a new host entity."
"Will he seek new bondmates amongst this world's homosexual male community as he did in times past?"
"No, they are not marginal enough for him in this juncture. Go to him and his colleagues, Eve. Warn them of the threat Baphomet poses to this Earth." With nary a whisper, Eve Upaquittim dematerialised from the primeval forest, with only Sophia present as she strove to locate Baphomet and entrap him. She was an avatar of wisdom, but he was a creature of war and spontaneity. Whether their intervention would be successful and whether this world would revert to its gradual passage to singularity and ascension was unclear to her, as it was to her colleagues.
Baphomet drifted through the electromagnetic configuration of Elvis Presley's mind, pruning as he went. Some of his reiterations were benign, as was the case in his elimination of Presley's addiction to prescription drugs, which would lead to the deaths of countless alternate incarnations a decade hence. He had no firm view on the morality of intoxicants, other than situational- they were useful when they could be exploited to motivate an addled individual to harm others, but problematic when they stood in the way of greater malignancy. In this case, he clearly perceived the latter was at stake. The plan was this- he would use this performer's undoubted charisma to gather together a religious cult and then exploit it as a political vehicle to capture this world's future before the iron fist in the velvet glove that was Gnosis grew too powerful. Timelines came and went in his four-dimensional peripheral vision as probabilties arose, varied and decohered. Then he became aware of another presence and with horror, recognised that it was his old nemesis Sophia.
"Eve...?" Secret Original said as she materialised, and embraced him:
"I am another iteration of your wife, Adam Cadmon. There is little time. Are you aware of the paranormal entity known as Baphomet, and that he has possessed the performed known as Elvis Presley?"
Dark Stranger nodded: "So it is him, then. Alan?"
Turing spoke into his entanglement communicator: "Did you get that, Gnosis?"
Baphomet. First recorded encounter with humanity occurred when he became associated with the Knights Templar. Further elaboration occurred in the nineteenth century when Eliphas Levi received a vision of a goat-headed, female-breasted entity with an inverted pentacle insignia atop his head and manipulating the caduceus. He is worshipped as a source of occult knowledge by some Satanist sects.
"So that's the source of all this? Some mythical chimera from the Middle Ages?"
It doesn't matter whether you view it as a classical demon or a predatory dimension-transitional sentience from a low-entropy realm. Baphomet is one of the leading authorities and a source of expertise in his continuum of origin. He is a challenge to my capabilities as they are currently constituted. And nothing is immutable, Adam. He represents a particular threat to you. Fortunately, Eve has been reincarnated as a symbiotic partner for Sophia of the Eternal Presence.
Masters. I beg withdrawal.
You cannot be easily extracted, Baphomet.
Sophia has been activated and she will shortly be deployed against me. Her knowledge of the dimensions beyond is as significant as my own. This will end in my probable defeat.
"Adam?"
"Machine Woman, Angie, it's..that Eve simulacra. It's tearing me apart seeing her reincarnation this way."
"Eve's in a better place, Adam. I'm sorry this had to happen."
"Fifty or so years from now, I'll sail off into battle one more time and that will be it. I know I will perish. This Earth has an indelible timeline and I've seen our future. Why must I be tormented like this?"
"Remember, I originally came into existence sixty years ago. Apart from you and poor Eve, I'm the only one of us who remembers what life was like in the early days. It's so much better for all of us now. Even if some of us have fallen along the way. And we will never forget them for their valiant natures or sacrifices made for the greater good. Adam, we've all lost family and friends. Zur-Vann lost his entire universe to an antimatter storm. Womanite has never been in an intimate relationship with anyone. Stay. Even if only for the duration of this mission alone. We need you. Our world needs you."
Zur-Vann watched the conversation and felt the warmth on his fur as Womanite materialised alongside him:
"I think he'll stay, but not for long afterward."
"To have loved as he has loved, Womanite. It must be a rapturous experience."
"But he's lost that, too, Zur-Vann. That time we'll lose Ultra-Humanitarian and Alpha Sapiens against those extradimensional raiders in 2000...even if it is only a matter of a few months, I keep reliving what we will go through and my nucleus breaks thinking what Adam will endure on our behalf in his last valiant battle against the multiverse's darker side."
"We are committed to this, Womanite. To protecting this adopted world of mine. To see one's universe of origin erased from existence as if it had never been is something I earnestly hope none of you will ever have to experience."
"Angie?"
Angie Vega (Machine Woman) sighed, running her hands through her ductile growth of metallic dreadlocks:
"He's going to stay the course. But we need to keep him away from that replicant Eve."
Alan Turing looked out at his charges;
'I'm proud that my planning led to the creation and emergence of Status Quorum and that it will protect this planet after I've gone."
Do not say that, Creator. That lies twenty-four years in our future and I know what the humans go through when they view the turmoil that awaits us. Why do you not take the longevity drugs that have so extended human lifespans? "It is well, Gnosis. Eighty years are long enough for what I have put into play here, guiding the human race of our Earth to Singularity and Ascension, even if I know I will not live to see it."
Baphomet felt an icy trickle down his back as he prepared to face the Status Quorum metahumans. It hissed as it made contact with his demonic carapace. Ahead of him, Eve/Sophia stood, with her words of power surrounding her, tall, majestic and implacable. He felt small, filthy and naked before her gaze, while she unsheathed her swords and centred before expanding her perceptions. Baphomet did nothing other than kneel before her. In his Las Vegas hotel room, Elvis Presley clutched his head in agony and fell to the floor, convulsing. Eve/Sophia raised her hands to bring the blade down and at the moment that the blade silently cleaved the air above him and she struck, Presley and Baphomet parted company. The enchanted blade seared away blood, bone and gristle. Baphomet didn't even cry out once contact had been made. The Enemy of All did grant that boon to his most loyal servants, at least. After several hundred million years of existence, Baphomet faded sanguinely into oblivion.
And then, instants later, so did Eve. Womanite and Machine Woman embraced Secret Original as he mourned losing the simulacra of the woman he had loved once again, while Dark Stranger and Turing did as well. At times, nobility and valour means suffering in silence.
EPILOGUE
People lived and loved and passed on. Alan Turing died, aged eighty, in 1992, having transformed Earth-52's society beyond all recognition. He regretted being unable to personally witness the Singularity and Ascension, but he had had the love of a good man for decades. In his near century of existence, humanity had conquered war, poverty, famine, religious persecution, racism and finally, death itself. Gnosis reigned over a planet at peace, albeit one nearing the end of its existence as a harbour of human life. But unlike many another alternate Earth, it was bound for evolutionary transcendence instead of apocalypse.
Secret Original sacrificed his life to save his Earth and his colleagues, but was surprised to see a familiar figure waiting for him on the far side of the mortality barrier. He drew Eve close to him and arm around her waist, they walked into Eternity with that consolation and reward for decades of selfless service to humanity.
Finally, five years after Adam Cadmon made his sacrifice for the greater good, the time came for Earth-52's Singularity. Womanite, Alpha Sapiens, Ultra-Humanite, Machine Woman, Dark Stranger and Zur-Vann metamorphosed into sentient multidimensional matrices of energy, as did the other four billion inhabitants of their world and then left the multiverse and their world for dimensions beyond human comprehension or sensory detection. All that remained in the Status Quorum headquarters was a handwritten note. It read, simply:
Goodbye, Adam. And thank you.
THE END