Err
The most basic unit of information represents a logical state with one of two possible values.
- Listen O earth! Rebels and sinners will be crushed
together and those who forsake the LORD will perish. - We’d had a whole year, abominating in the background, so happy, even though they say it’s daemons that influence man to be this way. And now panic(). For some reason, today the Elder’s words got to you. “Is this really worth giving up Paradise for?” you ask. “No, I mean THE Paradise, the actual one He will bring.”
- Wide is the gate and broad is the road is that leads to destruction, and many are those that will take it.
- “You say that now, but you’ll regret it when you see the Faithful Ones get to live forever with perfect bodies. All you’ll have is me and only for 80 years tops and then we die. Done. The end.”
- But small is the gate and narrow is the road that leads to life, and few are those that ever find it.
- “I’m not running away, I’m being real. We are literally talking about EVERLASTING LIFE here. Versus, like, total utter oblivion.”
- With the LORD, 1 day is as 1000 years, and 1000 years are as 1 day; He is not slow in bringing his Kingdom, but His day will come… like a thief!
- “If they’re right, and it is almost time, and you and I are still carrying on like this, then we’re done for.” Your shame covers you entirely. The surface of your body now unresponsive to mine. But I understand, your panic is a safety measure against the risk of fatality. And our whole families believe it, so leaving would mean losing them too.
Better to err on the side of caution.
So
we
slip
back into
the fold, like
notes tucked in
soft pages of parts
of the bible hardly ever
turned to because not even
the Elders get them, you know,
like Philemon or Nahum. Obscure letters.
Periods of captivity. Judgement of unknowns.
Holy f- Is that- ? OOP! God damn.
- It actually happened. The Faithful Ones are walking, single file and proud, along the long narrow road to life. There is light up ahead, where the New World is loading.
Our eyes meet across the doom. Can you believe it? You were right! I know, imagine if we’d done your idea of having one last night! We saved ourselves just in the nick of time didn’t we. Not a moment too soon.
- Below, on the broad road, Armageddon is kicking off, big time. Billions of people are collecting the wages of all their sins. That’s right, they’re all getting paid DEATH.
And now we understand, see it in each other’s faces, that the New World is almost here and there will be no margin of error there. No more excuses. No inherited sin to blame. And this is the real goodbye.
<EXCEPTION>:
try
{ prayer
} fail
try
{ avoid_source_of_temptation
} fail
try
{ good_works
} fail
try
{ reading_bible
} fail
retry fail
;
Not Found. Not Found Here Either.
- In the end, we couldn’t help ourselves. We are who we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯ So, a while back, you and I {1, 1} slipped off that wide highway, uncaught. It’s just dirt, the ground from there. We keep onwards and outwards, to where the crowd becomes a distant rumble, and the land is twilit. Scattered here and there are things that have blown in from the World over the years. Umbrella, tin of snuff, chariot’s wheel. Some sort of bodice. An unopened can of fizzy pop, the date stamp decades old. But we’re unlikely to find anything else to drink, so we crack it. It tastes so good. That must be absolutely full of sugar then, you say. I take another swig. Doesn’t matter now, does it?
- We come to the very outer edge of things, which is a membrane of dark blue silk. This we feel along with our fingers and even lean our whole bodies back onto. It gives some, but holds.
- There, in the soft/quiet, we see where our kingdoms are. In fleshly bodies. In minds we know are limited. In what’s eaten, in water that’s free. In arrays of stars and strings of seeds I barely noticed before. All of us uncountable. You’re the Elder now. You help me accept the shortness of my life, the total distance of all my days. How we can’t awaken unless from rest. The rest is good. You show me I’ll be gone soon, but that I’m alive for now. You show me today and today and today and today—
- Far off from us, where the small road reaches its peak, each one who has been saved steps into His light and
!
Line: trips
Char: the glitch opens up
Error: ‘body’ is undefined
Code: 1000 1 1000 1 1000 1 1000 1 1000 1 1000 1
REAL: Human machines can’t bear the promise of forever and the Lord’s heavy promise makes them crash.
Do you want to continue running?
—and today and today and today and today so that it never has the chance to turn into tomorrow. We continue quietly rebooting this final day, with its parameter, night, until the system resets.
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Do you wish to restart now? (continue/stop)
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come to an opening
and
step through:
Garbage in, garbage out? LOL
Somewhere in the back end
He is frantically looking back through the logs.
He searches endlessly for bad models or His own unpaid debt. This shouldn’t have been possible!
- A mist comes up from the ground. As it clears, we see that we have taken back the garden, and behold, it is even better. We forget our shame. Our eyes remain open but we overlook our nakedness. It turns out our bodies were perfect all along! Oh and you know what else? Daemons weren’t even evil. Guardian angels if anything. They’re just what helps you to better be yourself.
- THUMP! That’ll be another person dropping in, reloaded for a second chance. You can normally tell when they originally lived, based on how they’ve done their hair. Pitter-patters as they walk away, whatever age they are, they move as freely as a toddler. We have space, and time too. Because we have burst back to the beginning, interrupted this script hurtling towards Judgement Day, and erased everything cruel that happened in between. The end of the last days was at once the beginning of the first days. Admittedly, we don’t yet know how many days we have, and what the deal with time will be going forward, but we’ll get to that later.
- Yes it was us that did it, but we don’t let that go to our heads, or think it gives us the right to issue commands. We don’t start all that again! We melt back into the crowd, and this time it’s expansion, not erasure. Besides, it wasn’t just us. There were others doing the same, in the shadows all along the edge. We glimpsed them
when we were out there, and for a brief time, let two of them lie down with us.
- Everyone seems to gravitate to where all those rivers meet. We sit down. Alternately dozing, thinking, and chatting, we slowly recover. Everyone is a thing complete in itself. There are lions and lambs, but they don’t hang out, obviously, and we let them do their thing. Birdsong gently reminds us of morning and evening.
- Slept so well! That script of everything embarrassing that ever happened didn’t get performed. My memory must’ve had a little clean-up too, and gotten rid of anything unnecessary.
- Now, things are growing again. Fresh kernels are dropping on the ground. There are new values. We have enlarged the nation, and increased its joy.
- And when the serpent returns, we will already have the knowledge of life, and we will tell him things are gonna be a little different this time around. This time, it’s not an apple, it’s peaches, they’re fuzzy, and everyone gets to eat =>
Riley Rockford is writer and teacher in London. Her essay ‘An Alignment’, about power in high-control groups, is at n+1. Her CNF piece ‘Transition to Morningness’ was published in Boulevard Magazine, as Runner Up in their Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers. Her memoir ‘Domus Operandi’ is in Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers, which is in the UK’s Cambridge OCR A Level English syllabus. Riley’s longform fiction was a Top Ten finalist for the AWP James Allen McPherson Prize for the Novel, and shortlisted by CRAFT Literary. She has a London Writers Award and a PhD in Creative Writing.
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