It’s Resurrection Day. God is making good on His promises. All over the world, graves are opening, shrouds are unwrapping and scattered ashes are flying together on the four winds, assembling themselves into whole bodies like so much Instant Humanity (Just Add Water! See limbs form before your very eyes!)
There’s some competition for components, of course. Many carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms in particular have divided loyalties, having constituted more than one unique human bodies over the millennia. But the God of loaves and fishes deals with that simply enough, using a neat little trick involving temporal shifts and a loophole in the Rules about exactly which body, fourth-dimensionally-speaking, will return to life. There’s plenty to go around.
It’s lucky about that loophole, really. While the old are still old and the halt and disfigured are still slow and ugly, there are others who need a little shall we say nip and tuck?
The victims of torture, of car crashes, of dismemberment, of slow deaths in the desert (including, natch, the crucifixees), come back looking a little better than they did at the exact moment of their demise. Gives them a fair chance in the post-Resurrection world.
And what a world that’s shaping up to be. The living haven’t quite got their heads around it yet.
They even tried to kill the first few bodies coming out of the graveyard gates – too many zombie movies, I suppose – what a laugh that was! Murder, in the post-death age!
So far – and it’s only been ten hours – the truly religious are taking it best. The very old churchgoing ladies weren’t all that surprised to wake from their afternoon dozes to find Fred or George or Henry in the other chair, waiting for a cup of tea.
The devout and suffering mothers of the poor countries of the world turned from their baking or their weaving and ran into the arms of their formerly dead children, little boys and girls who came home to their mothers carrying even smaller babies. Why not? After all God had done to them, taken from them, why not at last this dream come true?
The Archbishop of Sydney, on the other hand, is having some difficulty. The Second Coming began at 3pm, Australian Eastern Standard time (adjusted for Daylight Savings). Now it’s 1 am on January 4, he’s fronting a press conference bigger than any congregation he ever managed to pull, and he’s not doing so well.
“Archbishop, do you believe this is God’s work? Is it a miracle, or a trick of the Devil?”
Suzanne Pretty. That bitch. Normally she’s a political correspondent, only bothering him when topics like abortion and paedophilia arise in the national debate. But this is one hell of a story and the respectful religion writers have been pushed aside by the gimlet glass and steel eyes of the TV camera and boom mike crowd.
“It’s too early to tell…” he begins.
“Hasn’t God spoken to His church,” calls out the 7.30 Report’s hound, seated front and centre. “What does that suggest to you, Archbishop?”
“God does not normally speak directly to His ministers,” Archbishop Bell begins. “Through his works, He…”
“Oh come ON,” interrupts The Australian’s disaster-and-terrorism specialist. “We can’t talk about normal life while the entire membership of the First Fleet is standing on Circular Quay, can we? Is this one of His works or not?”
“What about the abortions?”, jumps in the Herald’s health correspondent. “Can you comment on the fact that Westmead Hospital is only seeing babies past 21 weeks’ gestation in its birthing unit?”
But Bell’s not listening. His father has just walked into the room, followed by his grandfather and grandmother, and they’re pushing through the media pack towards him. They look like they’d like a word.
“I’m sorry, I’ll have to end this conference now,” he hardly has time to say, proving the cameras with a classic turn-pale-cut-and-run grab that the newsroom editors entirely misinterpret and use out of context, as usual.
By 3am Sydney time, everyone in the world – and that’s quite a lot of people now – is awake, apart from the very small babies. There are an awful lot of those, too, particularly in Africa, South American and Asia. China, for instance, is suffering what can only be called an embarrassment of baby girls.
In Ballarat, Victoria, the Slattery family is having a reunion of sorts. Six generations of Slatterys have been born in Australia since Frederick and Eustace arrived in 1862. With the various Thompsons, Smiths, Loaders and Murphys who fed the family tree along the way, there are now 127 people in Karen Slattery’s three-bedroom brick veneer home. Most of them want to watch the CNN news on cable, so she’s moved the box outside. A few, though, are being difficult.
“Hello? Hello, can you hear me in there? Would you PLEASE unlock the door? Hello?”
In the guest bedroom, Paul Murphy and Tamsin Murphy, nee Slattery, killed together in a train smash on their honeymoon in 1922, are going at it hammer and tongs for only the third time ever. As you would after an 83 year dry spell.
Sadly for them, their efforts to expand the Slattery clan will be in vain.
That’s the deal: the dead come back, but no new souls will be handed out. It seems unfair, but even the already pregnant are bound by the five-month rule.
In New York, several large publishers and event organizers have just cottoned on to the comeback potential of the Second Coming.
Ziggy Green is pacing his velvet-floored eyrie, knocking back whisky like there’s no tomorrow – or at least not one that includes death by cirrhosis of the liver.
“Hemingway!” he’s shouting. “Find me Hemingway! And Chandler if you can.” He stops and slaps his forehead. “WILLIAM BLOODY SHAKESPEARE.”
The ears of his agent in Europe ring like a bell.
Across the continent, Martin Sorvino, head of MaxiLab Films, is having similar thoughts.
“Fuckin’ Tolkein, I said! Yes I know he was an academic for fuck’s sake. But Pter Jackson thinks if we can just get him into a fucking screening room, we might get a sequel out of him. No, forget Monroe. She was washed up anyway. Leave her to the tabloids. Yes, Phoenix, if we’re good enough for him.”
Back in New York, John Lennon and Yoko Ono are watching snowflakes fall on Strawberry Field.
In Vienna, it’s just after 5pm. Albert Einsten is having a quiet coffee with Stephen Hawking, nutting out a few adjustments to a theory or two.
...tbc
