Pilgrims of a Shattered Spacetime

We don’t know what caused it, but the web was shorn ten years ago. Every life proceeded linearly as it always had, but the cords that bound them into synchronicity were severed.

We continued on, as best we could. It didn’t change much. You may see a young woman on the subway wearing a sweater in July and see her again in a summer dress in February. Occasionally, you see more disturbing things. The priests and inquisitors ignore us and at first seem merely bizarre. Until I saw them descend on some failing penitent on their own strand. He must have violated some indiscernible discipline. Then they were all dead eyes. And hooks. Dead eyes and hooks everywhere like a nightmare vision of Ezekiel’s seraphim. I hope that future is distant. Or that timeline lies on some thread of the multiverse that we never travel down.

One thread remains, interestingly. Easter always seems to line up, and you never see the stannic priests there. As you once knelt beside doctors and lawyers and tradesmen and crooks, you now kneel beside the orphaned pilgrims of every possible future, dressed in every style, threadbare peasants and transhumanists: one holy catholic and apostolic church. Maybe it was always that way, hidden from us, as the liturgy had implied.

We don’t have many answers or even many hints. Even that one hint, the synchronicity at Easter, doesn’t help as much as we’d like. Are we the remnant against an artificed Antichrist? Or is he the inevitable terminus of our little twist on Passover? Do the inquisitors of the metal god pay us homage or mockery with their Roman collars?