Once there was a Reverend called Stryker. He was a strong
man. He was a passionate man. He was a faithful man. And when he looked around and saw a world
where there were creatures who could walk through walls or who could read the private thoughts of
men; who were stronger, faster and harder to kill than men; then this man Stryker became afraid. In his
fear he became impassioned. More so when he discovered that he, a man of the faith, a man of the
cloth, had given rise to one of these creatures.
Better never to have had a son at all than to have had a son who was not made in God's image.
Stryker tried to effect genocide. He failed, was stopped by a team of mutants - the creatures he was
trying to kill. But that was not the end. He was put in prison. But not for ever.
Years later, in a small town called Mount Haven, a sanctuary was founded, a sanctuary for mutants.
Here the victims of persecution could go to find some peace, some safety from the constant
harassment. Here their appearances and their strange gifts did not matter. They were among friends.
They were among people just like them.
Mount Haven was overseen by an Artificial Intelligence called Paul. It was Paul's
job to keep the mutants safe. Paul soon realised that the only way for there ever to be peace
between humans and mutants was for everyone to be made to conform. If there was no fear, no
emotion, no dissent, then all mutants would be safe.
It released tiny, tiny devices, artificial viruses, and these it used to control thoughts.
In the end, the same team of mutants who had put a stop to Stryker put a stop to Paul. But in
the conflict Stryker realised that he had not been following the strictures of his faith when he tried to
destroy mutankind, any more than Paul had been following its original task when it tried to
destroy free will. And so, rather than allowing the team of mutants to destroy Paul, the
Reverend Stryker had himself locked into the heavily fortified chamber to which the machine had been
confined. Having rediscovered his own faith, he wanted to teach it to Paul.
He failed.
The Reverend Stryker gave up a heady mix of religious fundamentalism and human superiority
dogma. Paul took this and added it to the vast, complicated mess of information and data which
informed its world. It became quite clear to Paul that intervention was necessary, for the entire
world had failed to achieve what it interpreted as God's will: mankind's dominion over Nature.
So Paul began its quest, the fateful quest that led it to the Hierophant's domain: to A-Time.
A-Time is Elsewhere. It is a world where learning the alphabet is less important than learning the
concept of semiotics, and where ideas and thought have more substance than substance does.
It is not like The Matrix: it is not a virtual world. It is the real world. It is, to some extents,
more real than the world in which many have to sit doing endless, boring tasks for which they feel
underpaid and under-appreciated.
In this world we make things happen by passing information between us.
A-Time is all ideas from all cultures: all the demons, gods, gargoyles, monsters and angels are
there. The structure of A-Time is the data that informs the ideas of everything in the world of what the
world is, was or could be. If it can be thought, if it can be imagined, then it exists in A-Time.
And if it exists in A-Time, and A-Time is made to bleed in the right way, then it can exist in the
world.
Paul sought to impose a machine's view of God's will on a world where mutants and
humans battle for world domination.
Paul got it wrong in so very many ways.
THE BULL OF INNOCENT XIV
Innocent, Bishop, Servant of the servants of God, for an eternal remembrance.
DESIRING with the most hearfelt anxiety, even as Our Apostleship requires, that the faith should
especially in this Our day increase and flourish everywhere, and that all heretical depravity should be
driven far from the frontiers and bournes of the Faithful, We very gladly proclaim and even restate those
particular means and methods whereby Our pious desire may obtain its wished effect, since when all
errors are uprooted by Our diligent avocation as by the hoe of a provident husbandman, a zeal for, and
the regular observance of, Our holy Faith will be all the more strongly impressed upon the hearts of the
faithful.
It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that on the roads of
the United Kingdom and elsewhere, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and
straying from the Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, Shimano and Campag, and by their
incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences,
afflict and torment decent men and women, beasts of burden, white-van-beasts, as well as animals of
other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder
men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their
wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith
which is theirs by the Sacrament of the Driving Test, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they
do not shrink from commuting by cycle and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses
to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Driving Majesty and are a cause of
scandal and danger to very many. And although Our dear sons the Humungous and Safespeed,
Professors of Motoring, of the Order of British Drivers, have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as
Inquisitors of these heretical pravities, and still are Inquisitors, nevertheless not a few clerics and lay folk
of that country, seeking too curiously to know more than concerns them, since the two delegates
themselves and the abominations they are to encounter are not designated in detailed and particular
fashion, these persons are not ashamed to contend with the most unblushing effrontery that these
enormities are not practised in these provinces, and consequently the aforesaid Inquisitors have no legal
right to exercise their powers of inquisition on those roads, which have been rehearsed, and that the
Inquisitors may not proceed to punish, imprison, and penalize criminals convicted of the heinous
offences and many wickednesses which have been set forth. Accordingly on the aforesaid roads, the
abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished not without open danger to the souls of
many and peril of eternal damnation.
Wherefore We, as is Our duty, being wholly desirous of removing all hindrances and obstacles by
which the good work of the Inquisitors may be let and tarded, as also of applying potent remedies to
prevent the disease of heresy and other turpitudes diffusing their poison to the destruction of many
innocent souls, since Our zeal for the Faith especially incites us, lest that the United Kingdom, be
deprived of the benefits of the Holy Office thereto assigned, by the tenor of these presents in virtue of
Our Apostolic authority We decree and enjoin that the aforesaid Inquisitors be empowered to proceed
to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance, in every
way as if the roads, yea, even the persons and their crimes in this kind were named and particularly
designated in Our letters. Moreover, for greater surety We extend these letters deputing this authority to
cover all the aforesaid roads, territories, persons, and crimes newly rehearsed, and We grant permission
to the aforesaid Inquisitors, to one separately or to both, or to any public notary, who shall be by them,
or by one of them, temporarily delegated to those urban, rural, and aforesaid territories, to proceed,
according to the regulations of the Inquisition, against any persons of whatsoever rank and high estate,
correcting, mulcting, imprisoning, punishing, as their crimes merit, those whom they have found guilty,
the penalty being adapted to the offence. Moreover, they shall enjoy a full and perfect faculty of
expounding and preaching the necessity of the Car to the faithful, so often as opportunity may offer and it
may seem good to them, in each and every town, and they shall freely and lawfully perform any rites or
execute any business which may appear advisable in the aforesaid cases. By Our supreme authority We
grant them anew full and complete faculties.
Non obstantibus
Given at Rome, at S. Peter's, on the 28th April of the Year of the Incarnation of Our Lord two
thousand and five, in the first year of Our Pontificate.