Salvation Through Eternity

I would like to thank everyone for reading this blog. I will no longer be updating it. As of a few weeks ago I willingly joined The Electric Church. I am now Brother Muller of the Gamma Brethren.

I have been saved. I now have eternity to contemplate my sin and work for salvation. It may be enough time. You will be long dead by the time I attain salvation, and you will die unsaved. Unless you do as I have done and study the Mulqer Codex and join The Electric Church.

Peace be with you. If you wish to seek my guidance, I will be happy to show you an endless trail of sunsets.

My Friends in the SSF

I've been out of circulation--my friends in the System Security Force, the System Pigs, scooped me up in a raid and I've been pissing in the corner of a Blank Room ever since, getting beaten twice a day by a huge motherfucker they all called "Mongo" and generally fucked with.

Fucking cops. The worst of it is, they didn't even care about charging me with anything. They just used me for punching practice. They knew I was a nobody, they were just enjoying themselves.

I generally don't have anything against the Crushers, the uniformed cops that walked beats. They were just on the bottom of the pyramid like me--maybe a tick higher--and were just making their way. But after these two weeks I'm thinking, how could any man or woman work with those assholes, the officers, the System Pigs? They're pissing on their own race.

Oy vey, and I get back to my little scrap of the world and not only have the Monks doubled since I was scooped, but I lost my pathetic little apartment too. Shared it with six other desperate folks, and they couldn't wait for me to re-emerge. Thought I was dead. My small number of possessions sold, too, and that yen long gone. Shit. At least I can crash with Avery for a few nights, I think. Cates is a grouchy old man, but he's got a good side to him.

Be back when I'm on my feet again.

Breathing Space

Weird, how the streets create strange bedfellows. Yesterday who do you think came to my rescue? The System Pigs. The SSF.

The cops and the Monks are always uneasy with each other. The Monks are legal reps of a legal, registered religion, so the cops can't just do what they like. More importantly, the Monks and The Electric Church have muscle and money, so the cops don't dare mess with them. Someone like me, no one gives a shit about, so the pigs can do what they like. With the Monks, you can see the cops think twice. It's weird and unsettling to watch.

But yesterday I guess the cops had had a bad day, and they went after the Monks that have been worrying me. Just ran them off, yelling about street permits or some such bullshit--the cops make that shit up as they need to, quoting regs that were passed twenty freaking years ago and no one remembers. But hell, today I'm sitting here having some terrible gin and damned if it's almost peaceful. I'm still starving, but for the first time ever I'm glad the SSF is around.

Web site?

Holy crap, the goddamn Electric Church has a web site: the-electric-church.com. It's creepy; I mean, aside from the general creep factor involved with anything connected to TEC, there're all sorts of weird technical glitches, like someone is trying to communicate, or hack into the system, or something.

Getting worried

There was this guy, Dav Remner, I knew. Typical low-level muscle/hustler, would do anything short of murder for a few yen. Not feared or anything, but well-liked as far as that goes. He was getting up there, a little creaky in the bones--must have been thirty if he was a day--around the age you start feeling sorry for people. Wouldn't have surprised me if he died, if he was too slow on some job and got popped, or if he burst a vessel in his sleep and never woke up. Wouldn't have surprised me at all. A lot of times you wake up in the morning and someone you used to hang around with is just gone.

I never would have thought he'd go and fucking join the Electric Church. But I wake up today, and Dav is now Brother Remner. He made the rounds, creepy plastic face and reflective glasses and all. Called me Nad, told me he was so happy, invited me to look into it.

Dav Remner couldn't shut up about how he hated the Monks. Dav would go on and on, after a few cups of Pick's corrosive gin, about how The Electric Church were evil motherfuckers. We had to shut him up about it all the time. There is no WAY he'd join the goddamn Tin Men voluntarily. Or so I thought. But here he is, prancing around in his new robot body, preaching Mulquer Codex. This shit is getting crazy.

Access ain't easy

It's never easy to find open nodes to get online with. Even when you find one, you gotta scope it for fucking weeks to make sure it isn't just a goddamn SSF honeypot. It's amazing--thousands of us wandering around without a pot to piss in, desperate, and the SSF has nothing but time to spend trying to trap us in class-C misdemeanors.

So I've been scraping by. More Monks on my ass, it's like I'm in their system now, my face, my photo, just on their net and whenever one of the bastards scans me an alarm goes off--there's Nad Muller, let's go fuck with him. I can't go anywhere without one of them noticing me and coming over. Hello Nad. How are you, Nad. You're looking a little worried, Nad, maybe you need forever to contemplate your sins, what do you say? Just look at their creep-ass web site: the-electric-church.com. If that doesn't make you want to run the other way, nothing will.

I've known a few people who've joined the Electric Church. They're not people any more, of course--they're cyborgs. But they still *seem* like themselves, in some ways. Of course, they all look alike, so I can't fucking tell them apart myself. But once in a while this one Monk, Brother Hassam, who used to be a guy I'd get drunk with in Pick's, he sees me and strolls over--and it's weird, because he's this thing, this Tin Man, with a modulated voice and a plastic face, but he comes over and says "Hey, Nad, how are you? Still picking pockets over on the Bowery?" and we'll have a goddamn conversation. And he always ends it by telling me how happy he is now that he'll never die, and how I should let him convert me. So we can have that damned conversation over and over again, for-fucking-ever, I guess.

Anyway, gotta run. This node's hot, I can feel it, and the last thing I need is a System Pig's boot on my neck this morning.

The Monks Scare Me

Fucking Monks. Tin Men. Cyborgs. Everywhere, every-fucking-where I go, there they are.