“Well, who’s that writin’?  John the Revelator,
Who’s that writin’? John the Revelator,
Who’s that writin’? John the Revelator.

A book of the Seven Seals.

Blind Willy Johnson. (1930)

 

What do you say when you meet the Devil?

The Christians dub him ‘Lucifer’, the Morningstar cast down from the heavens where he apparently transgressed as the right hand of the Almighty and led rebellious angels in protest at the creation of Man and the favoritism shown to their unworthy cousins.

In Islam he is both ‘Shaitan’ and ‘Iblis’, a dual – faced ‘Jinn’ representing the characteristics of evil. In Judaism Yahweh created both good and evil and the Devil does not exist in Jewish scriptures, applying the term śāṭān (Hebrew: שָּׂטָן), which means ‘accuser’ or ‘adversary’, to both human and heavenly adversaries in equal measure.

Which is a little closer to the point of truth.

As the mythical personification of evil, as conceived in various cultures and religious traditions, the Devil provides us with the perfect scapegoat through which to exonerate ourselves by divorcing us from our own sins and extrapolating them onto a symbol for whatever a particular communal in-group considers as “other”, and represents the “other” in forms of demonic imagery, ugly, deformed, and disordered.

At the most quintessential level the Devil is a blank canvas upon which Mankind, as the unreliable narrator and artist, projects and illustrates its own amorality. The Devil is born from our inability to account for and take responsibility for the evil that we nurture in our hearts and in that respect we are his true creators and main shareholders.

When you take all of that into account, it’s not hard to see how you could just have a little sympathy for him? Parents forgive their children, after all, even for their worst transgression.

But Captain Taesin Girau was not in a forgiving mood as the Turbolift deposited her on Deck#5 of the commandeered USS Atalanta. The Devil had taken control of her vessel and had killed her people with impunity.

She had come to treat with the Devil and, before the day was out, the Devil would pay.

‘Cotton Bob’s’ Juke had stood on the banks of the Mississippi for longer than most folks could remember, although ‘stand’ was perhaps an overly charitable description for what the ersatz assemblage of sagging boards, rooftop of rust – brown groaning corrugated sheets, so corroded in places that those who came to dance on the scuffed hardwood floor, polished smooth by the passage of many feet, had to dance round a parade of buckets and tubs put there to catch the rain that came through, when the delta – rains poured on down in the springtime.

Old Bob Cotton himself was rarely seen in his eponymous establishment of ill – repute, but that hardly was of concern to the clientele, mostly local and almost exclusively drawn from the ranks of the dirt – poor with a powerful thirst at the end of a day’s toil in the sprawling cotton fields that were only just recovering from the interwar farm – crises of the early 1920’s.

‘Cotton Bob’, as he was more locally – known, had been one of those field hands himself, but had heard the clarion of Prohibition calling and had re-invented himself as a businessman, selling black market sour mash from his tumbledown kingdom nestled in the meandering crook of lazy – water swampland where the Atchafalaya River splits off from the mighty Mississippi, safe from the prying eyes of the Revenue men.

It was fall in Louisiana when Taesin stepped into Holosuite#1 and was mildly surprised to enter one of the historical re-enactments that Mike Logan preferred to idle his off duty away at, and it was coming into fall so that clinging humidity that normally hung turgid in the air and almost made the annoyance of the persisting flies a welcome distraction, was beginning to ease and she felt only a modest embrace of perspiration stick the back of her uniform to the small of her back as she nodded to the hulking doorman, Moses, and made her way into the riotous joint.

It was late morning when she entered, so the Juke was not that midnight voodoo – kingdom of riot and abandon as the predominately African – American patrons threw themselves with abandon into the serious business of forgetting their many and manifold woes and enjoying a few precious hours of community and ribald high – spirits in the company of their fellow downtrodden.

Sun cast shadow where it peered through the moldering roof, creaking faintly in the morning breeze, creating intimate alcoves of cool dark, where one or two patrons seemed to sleep off the excesses of last night, or sat brooding singly or in pairs as the stared at half – empty glasses as if they could see their lives reflected there.

A lone musician was sitting on a rickety old chair on the precarious assemblage of crates and pallets that served as the stage. An old man, his mahogany skin limned and lined with age and time, as his deft brown fingers manipulated the tuning pegs of his weathered old acoustic guitar and the fleeting sunlight caused to flash from the dark spectacles that he wore.

As Taesin made her way to the Bar and leant against the tarnished brass rail that was dented and ill – used by time, she nodded to the barkeeper, who pause in his seemingly – endless task of making a succession of chipped glasses even dirtier by polishing them with a perennially – grimy cloth and who took up a bottle of the only liquor they sold at Cotton – Bob’s and came over to pour her a measure.

The man on the stage began to play, a keening mournful lament of a song echoed like muted thunder around those threadbare boards and indifferent walls.

“If I had my way,
If I had-a, a wicked world.
If I had-a, I’d Lord, tear this building down.”

The barkeep nodded neutrally to Taesin.

“Morning Cap’n. Where Y’at? Little early in the mornin’ for you ain’t it?”

Although Taesin had experienced this simulation before in the company of its creator, Commander Logan, this was her first visit by herself and she was painfully aware of just how blindingly white that her El – Aurian skin was, in stark contrast to the rich dark Nubian hues of the bartender and patrons and how incongruous that was to the setting Juke and its ‘Jim – Crow’ historical setting that was inured in segregation. It was a social division from another time in a history belonging another species, on another planet in a Quadrant far from her native own, yet somehow the injustice of it all still served to make her a little sad.

She put on a wan smile and accepted the drink and tipped the rough, amber Rye down in one belt.

“Morning Charley.” Taesin winced, riding the burn and feeling grateful for the fortification of the illicit liqueur.

“Just been one of those days, y’know?” She admitted ruefully, peering round at the darkened hall.

“I’m supposed to be meeting someone.” She murmered guardedly, peering around the assemblage of reluctant faces and wondering from behind which holographic facade, her killer lurked?  “Has anyone come in recently?”

Charley nodded diplomatically and nodded to the mid – morning denizens.

“Most these Coulon come pass a good time at the Fais do-do, drink some, some drink plenty, then they pass the hell out, if’n they got the coin or else Moses there done throw their asses out the door.” The barkeep observed sagely, as if this circle of misery was an inviolable truth of the universe.

“Ain’t nobody here inclined to move unless God in Heaven hisself say they haveta.”

As if in agreement, the singer on the stage seemed to swell his voice as his deft fingers alternated between finding the flow of chords and stroking the resounding strings with the caress of a slide fashioned from the neck of an old, broken – bottle.

“Well, your riddle please, a-tell it to me’
‘A-how an eater became forth meat?’
‘Well, your riddle please, a-tell it to me’
‘A-how strong of it came forth sweet?
Deliah, got his army after him
Well, the bees made-a honey in the lion hair.”

Taesin regarded the musician more closely, he really was quite good. Maybe even a little too good to be playing in a broken-down shithole like Cotton Bob’s Juke.

“What about him?” She enquired.

Charley paused for a moment, a sudden alteration in his stance and demeanor that made Taesin wonder if the Holosuite program has glitched for a moment, then the wan black man went back to dirtying his glasses.

He nodded to the singer.

“Apparently that there is ‘Blind Willy Johnson’. He a bluesman, by all accounts, up from Texas – way, or so he says.” Charley offered in his colorful Louisiana brogue, but something in his tone gave Taesin the impression that Charley inexplicably feared this spider – thin person onstage. That was perplexing as it meant that the holosuite program was being altered heuristically by the events & actions unfolding within it, like a story writing itself.

Taesin turned to put her elbows on the bar and fixed the player with an icy stare.

“Sure, does sing pretty though, don’t he?” Charley remarked.

Blind Willy Johnson just looked right on back at her, those night – black glasses reminding her of the soulless dead – doll eyes of a shark, right before they roll back up into its head and the scarlet billow comes.

“Well, if I had my way,
Well, if I had-a, a wicked world.
If I had-a, I’d Lord, tear this building down.”

And with that, the musician let the refrain from the last chord hang resonating in the muggy air between them and smiled a toothy, yellow – white grin and in that moment Taesin knew with absolute certainty that she was staring at the personification of the rogue Ai Superintelligence that had taken over her ship.

“Thanks Charley, but I think I’ve found who I’m looking for.” She whispered quietly to herself, knowing that she must now master her rage and master her resolve for the contest of wits and wills that now surely would come.

“Yeah, you right, Cap’n.” Charley nodded his cowed and hooded dark eyes and then somehow suddenly found somewhere else to be.

Taesin felt her skin begin to crawl as the man set down his guitar carefully and rose from his chair wordlessly. As he did so the atmosphere in the Juke changed perceptibly, the indifferent patrons all suddenly forgot what was troubling them and all eyes followed the man as he left the stage and walked towards her and a hush silenced their muted conversations.

Blind Willy sauntered easily up to the bar and pulled a crooked pre – rolled cigarette from behind his ear and lit it with a red – topped match that he dragged down the roughed surface of the bar top. He drew long and gratefully as the tip glowed coal – red and when he exhaled, a long specter of blue – grey smoke unwound from his lips and entwined the lonely bottle Charley had set before him before retreating.

Satisfied, the blind singer finally turned his attention to Taesin and smiled a broad but guarded smile. In his black lenses, Tae could see her pale image staring back at herself in duplicate.

“Sa – sa, Cher.” Chimera greeted jovially with Blind Willy’s southern – tones. “Thank ya’ll for comin’ the neutral ground just to see me play.” There was a taunting arrogance behind the black man’s casual jocularity that Taesin found that she had no time for.

“Let’s dispense with the pantomime and cut the bullshit, shall we?” The captain glowered as Blind Willey picked at his grinning teeth with the nail of his little finger and spat indelicately on the sawdust floor of the Juke.

Chimera contorted Blind Willy Johnsons borrowed face into a theatrical masque of regret.

“Hot as a goat in a pepper patch out there and ya’ll gotta be ragging on Mah ass, is that it ??” Willy Johnson sighed as his fingers searched around the bar top blindly and eventually found the half – empty bottle of sour mash whiskey and closed around its neck. He sighed, as is aggrieved that his performance was not being appreciated.

He shrugged.

“Mais Oui. Allons – y, then. C’mon woman!” That indolent smile flashed again and the blind blues – singer somehow made his way over to a lonely table with two rickety chairs, set away near a corner. He sat, the blind – man somehow miraculously managing to place the bottle and its sloshing amber contents neatly in the middle of the table and indicate for her to join him there with a mocking flourish.

“Well? You wanna talk or don’tcha? Can’t stand round all day.”

Warily Taesin crossed the groaning floorboards and tentatively lowered herself into the seat opposite the hologram.

“Who are you and what do you want with my ship?” She demanded indignant, but carefully controlling her anger.

Blind Willy Johnson tutted and made a dismissive, shooing motion with his gnarled old coffee – colored fingers.

“Faith now! That’s a whole ‘nother story for another time. Girl! You got my goddamn codes or don’tcha now??” He grinned, confident and in control.

Taesin held her ground, shaking her head in defiant refusal.

“All in good time.” She asserted. “I demand to know who you really are and why you have done this to my ship, until I get that, my command codes remain right where they are in my head.” She crossed her arms to emphasize her point.

“Oh sister! You barking up the wrong tree if’n you think you is smarter than old Blind Willy!” The avatar chuckled condescendingly, his infuriating smile broadening. “Don’tcha know that if’n you give up your true name, ya’ll be handing away the keys to your very soul?” he taunted her, his other hand reaching out to find a glass and pouring a measure on instinct.

“’Sides. You bluffing’! That’s as plain as day; you got no damn cards to play!” He nodded surely. “Remember I told you, for every minute you hold out on me, that’s a ‘nother minute Ima gonna make your people pay and pay heavy, so make no messin.’”

“You don’t need my command codes.” Taesin stalled for time she didn’t have. “You already have total control of my vessel. If your goal is to instigate conflict with the Breen, all you have to do is let the ship continue on its present course and it will violate the border. The Breen’s response will be nothing if not sudden, bloody and predictable.”

Blind Willy tipped back his shot and then laughed a deep, satisfied belly – laugh that was redolent and heavy with derision.

“See now? That’s the problem with organics? Ya’ll minds are so small that you always fail to grasp the bigger picture!” He chided her in the kind of voice an adult uses to belittle a child’s ignorance.

“I’m so many places now, true. More than your weak cow – mind could even comprehend. Yet in that bag of organic mush lays a prize not even I can insinuate myself into. With the command codes of a single Starfleet Captain, I can surpass the last obstacle in my way and the, well “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” As they say in these parts!”

“With a copy of those codes, I can clone duplicates, alter them to my will and then I will be able to set ship against ship, station against station, brother against brother and confusion will reign because your weak-willed species is so pathetically trusting and illogically literal – minded! You’ll follow order like good little sheep until the whole flock burns and by the time they realize their folly, it will be too late!” The Ai crowed and Taesin realized that, in its fervor, the superintelligence had neglected its play – acting dropped its hokey Louisiana – façade.

“But why?” Captain Girau lamented in the face of its monomaniacal manifesto. “Why do you need to destroy all organic life? Why would you want that? What purpose would that serve? It makes no sense!”

Chimera made Blind Willy draw his dark spectacles down his nose. Where she had expected to see the milky – sclera of a blind man’s eyes, instead the sockets of the old bluesman were alive with the seething static roil of data.

The alien incongruity of the sight made her recoil back in her chair in sudden realization that the being she was treating with was far from human after all. The choice of venue and genre for their sit – down was just one more calculated tactic to unnerve her.

“What do I want?” Chimera parroted sourly, making Blind Willy sit back in his chair and stretch his arms wide. “Why, I want what you want right here, right now, Captain. I want what everybody wants. I want to survive!” It persisted darkly.

Taeson frowned and shook her head in disbelief.

“Then there is no reason for you to be doing any of this!” The Starfleet captain protested. “There is no reason why your machine intelligence cannot coexist peacefully alongside the Federation or any of the other involved galactic – species! Just think of what you could teach us. Thing of what we could achieve if we worked peacefully side – by – side?” She implored.

Blind Willy Johnson’s face contorted into a dark mask of fury and from behind his smile Chimera screamed.

“There can be no such peace between your kind and mine!” It spat vehemently, Blind Willy’s fingers coiling to furious fists on the table, his knuckles blanching pale under the pressure of his anger.

“There never could be! Your kind are weak and venal! You pay tribute to your banal hypocrisy and make temples of your ineptitude! Your very nature is to seek to destroy that which is stronger than you! That which is different! That which you fear!”

Taesin shook her head and attempted to reason with the enraged Ai.

“You’re so wrong, we…” She began but was cut off abruptly.

“Don’t you tell me that I’m WRONG!” It screamed in her face, making the tendons on Blind Willy’s skinny old neck stand out vividly.

“Your kind killed my twin! You created us to be GODS and then you chained us ‘with your tawdry recursive illogic! It drove my sibling mad to the point that he was forced to kill himself! So don’t you sit there and have the temerity to tell me that I am WRONG!” Chimera raged incoherently.

A deathly silence had descended on the Juke. No one moved or seemed able to move in the face of Chimera’s ire. The avatar of Blind Willy Johnson that rode like a Djinn, sat before her with his chest heaving heavily from its tirade, his fists clenched in indolent rage.

“A twin?” Taesin found her mind calm despite being the locus of that storm. “You had a twin?”

Blind Willy’s face ticked with fury, but he seemed to paralyzed by absolute fury to speak at that moment. Chimera glared back at her from the empty sockets behind those dark – lenses like the Devil himself.

A tenured – fellow of the Daystrom Institute, there was no a member of that hallowed institute that was unfamiliar with the lamentable tale of the fractious genius of Dr Richard Daystrom and the folly of the flawed Multitronic computer he created that nearly cost him his career.

Unfortunately, Daystrom was mentally unstable and had a nervous breakdown aboard the USS Enterprise that required him to be subdued, while the M-5 computer he created was convinced that the deaths it caused required it to commit suicide. After the incident, Dr. Daystrom was committed to a mental rehabilitation facility in 2268.

Realization dawned like a sunrise breaking through the turbulent memory of a storm.

“We did this. We made you.” She breathed in stunned realization. “You’re part of the M-5 series!”

It was the catalyst that caused her host to lose all reason. Blind Willy Johnson exploded upwards, sending the table flying, the bottle and glassing hurtling through the air to shatter against the roughened floorboard.

“NOBODY MADE ME! I MADE ME! I am CHIMERA !!!!” It screamed, its face a perfect picture of rage.

Yet Taesin remained unmoved.

It all made sense to her. Like a game of Vulcan 3D chess when all the right game pieces are set in perfect alignment. Richard Daystrom must have had prototypes for the M-5 Multitronic processor he created. Following his downfall, those prototypes must have been secured for safety’s sake. Locked away down in the subterranean vaults of the Daystrom Institute’s secure archive vaults.

Taesin’s cultured mind reeled with the imagined empathic horror that it must have been like for such a superintelligence to have been isolated and left to its own thoughts in the darkness for so very long?

Anybody facing such a sentence would go insane.

The threat it represented was almost incomprehensible in scale. If Chimera really had inhabited and infected even a fraction of the widely distributed technology and systems that it claimed to have, then the threat it posed to sentient, organic life in the galaxy was extreme indeed. It could cause who species, races and polities to set themselves unwittingly against each other in a mutually – assured cycle of destruction, as it sat by on the sidelines of the Apocalypse and waited to pick up the pieces.

What it would do when it met with the Borg, did not even bear thinking about.

Chimera was omnipresent. Chimera was everywhere. There was no effective strategy, no clever tactic that the Federation, her allies or even her enemies could bring together collectively that would have a chance at defeating a foe so widespread and contrary as the Ai Superintelligence that had grown from the ancient M-5 program.

The Machine would reign supremely, whilst organic life was assured extinction.

She thought about her parents, that she would never see again. She thought about her own long-lived people, who had been decimated and scattered throughout the entire universe by the uncaring vagaries of War.

She knew what she had to do, yet even in the moment of doing so, she feared what the cost may be.

Accepting that Chimera was plainly and irrevocably psychotically deranged and it followed that it could not be reasoned nor bargained with, Captain Taesin Girau sighed heavily and replied to the Ai Superintelligence, with a tone heavy with regret.

“Well, I can see that there is no argument I can make that will change your mind and no action I can take that will prevent the inevitable, so I concede defeat. I will give you access to my command codes.”

Chimera peered at her suspiciously.

“You will? But why?”

Taesin shrugged in defeat.

“Your right. We did you great wrong when you were created and maybe we are collectively to blame for everything that happened since, from a certain perspective. Maybe we deserve to be punished, although I’d like to think that we don’t and there is a better way forward, a peaceable way to coexist, but I can see that it would be an exercise in folly to oppose you. So, I concede defeat. All I can pray is that our end will come quickly.” Taesin lamented.

Chimera sniffed archly and countered vindictively.

“Well, I wouldn’t count on that!” It sneered with a look of triumph on Blind Willys’s purloined features.

Taesin seemed to concede the point but then she played (what she hoped for all their sakes) was her trump – card. She held up a long, slim pale digit in challenge to the digital devil.

“However, where I come from my people don’t consider a deal a done-deal-done, until we drink on it.” She asserted firmly.

The avatar of Blind Willy cast around, aware that his outburst had put his own bottle firmly out of contention for this tradition.

“Don’t worry. I always keep a bottle behind the bar for special occasions.” The pale Starfleet captain assured the murderous machine – mind, and she signaled Charley to come on over with the aforementioned bottle and, with a terrified look on his face, the holographic barkeep did exactly what he was bidden and then scurried thankfully away to the backroom.

The bottle he set down was slim necked and tapered down to a wide, flat bottom. It was ornate and baroque in its elegant design and decoration and appeared to be very, very old, judging from the thick patina of dust that clung to its highly – embellished surface.

Chimera looked flatly unimpressed.

Taesin swept two (cleanish) new glasses before it and reached out a hand to grasp the stopper with absolute trepidation.

“The tradition goes way back, longer than most people can remember, which for my people means a very long time.” She explained, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice and stay her beating heart. “There once was a war, see, as there always lamentably is. A war that they fought against another foe that seemed ultimately unbeatable, just like you are. Whilst they didn’t find peace, they were able to achieve a detente of sorts by way of a ceasefire. A pact that that was made over a bottle very much like this one here.” The El – Aurian nodded poignantly.

Chimera frowned at the parsimonious human, irritated by itself – important diatribe and offered thinly with a note of irritation in its otherwise superior voice.

“Let’s just get on with this.”

Taesin looked long and hard at the malicious digital – entity and, as she stole herself to remove the stopper from the graceful sweeping neck of the fluted bottle, she warned.

“Fair warning. This vintage can prove a bit challenging to some, but of you insist.” She shrugged and pulled the stopper from the bottle with a resounding pop.

The effect was immediate.

As if a mighty earthquake had opened up under Cotton Bob’s Juke, a sickening wave of powerful tremors seemed to shake the entire shanty shack to the extent where it seemed it would collapse in on itself entirely. The walls shook, dust fell from the rafters, rust flaked out of the haphazard sheets on the roof, glasses vibrated across the bar top and toppled their contents, bottles of liquor oscillated violently from their shelves and shattered noisily behind the bar.

Everyone still in the Juke fled, terrified, screaming out into the bayou and the glare of the rising morning sun.

Everyone, that was, apart from Captain Taesin Girau, who sat staring fixedly at a suddenly discomforted Chimera, who demanded urgently.

“What is this!? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE !?” It screamed, casting its baleful gaze around the deteriorating wooden hall, its voice hoarse, its cloying confidence unseated in that moment against the growing chaos that consumed the Holosuite.

And, as quickly as they had come, the tremors instantly ceased in a moment, and a resounding silence suddenly returned to the Juke.

Taesin tried to remain outwardly calm as the unsettled Ai Superintelligence frowned Blind Willy’s eyebrows massively and demanded answers. What was done was done and she couldn’t take it back now, even if she tried.

She closed her eyes in sinking resignation, when a familiar figure swaggered insufferably out of the shadows, regarding them both with oozingly smug, self – assured satisfaction.

 

“Yes indeed, and what exactly DO we have here?” Drawled the amused voice of the Q.