Dedication
This book is explicitly dedicated to No One.
The liquidity of Water is not to be found at the level of the individual molecule, nor [is] the visual perception… to be found at the level of the individual neuron or synapse.
—Searle
Episode I. The Anointing of Mother Magdalena | Chapter 1.
12:1 | And a great sign appeared in Heaven: a woman clothed with the Sun, with the Moon under her feet, and on her Head a crown of twelve stars.
—REVELATION | The Woman and the Dragon
WITH A SWIFT PRICK OF PANIC SUDDENLY INJECTING HER WITH a sharp sting of anguish and cynicism, the woman squashed the Blood-soaked pancreas with her fist in rage, hurled it at the floor, and darted from her tiny bedroom toward the nearby flight deck, Blood rushing to her Head with mortification. Approaching the cockpit, the frantic woman reflected inquisitively upon the flash of deep insight she had just obtained, began uneasily entertaining the idea that she may very well have fallen victim to a scheme more expansive and elaborate than her own.
With a few fingerings atop the surface of the console’s flat screen control panel, the woman disengaged light-speed and initiated descent, adjusting the ship’s altitude to take course within the Earth’s thermosphere. She sat frantically on the edge of her seat, smacking herself upside her perspiring forehead in an attempt to jostle herself awake in case she had been dreaming. As she approached Earth, the tense woman at the cockpit directed her gaze straight ahead, eyeing the closed shutter just in front of her. With an eager touch of a button at the control panel, the automated shutter retracted to reveal a murky outdoors.
The woman anxiously peered through the great glass dashboard to notice it was nighttime. She flipped the switch that powered on the ultra-fluorescent headlights. Straining her neck toward the front glass, the woman gazed into the darkness in an attempt to see if she could see anything out of the ordinary. Her heart was racing. With the touch of another button at the control panel, the little spaceship dipped another few kilometers South. That was when the woman caught first sight of the remnants of mayhem just below her: the sinister miasma blanketing the air with dark greys, spread out in thick gloomy puffs, slowly rolling upward.
She gasped.
“NO!” the woman yelled out in alarm, her whole back now soaked in sweat. The smoke was quickly rising up around the ship, encasing it with its drear envelopes.
As the space-pod quickly found itself shaking viciously through the turbulence, immersed in the dense smog of dusky greys that were ravaging the night sky, a flash of embarrassment lit the inside of the woman’s cheeks on fire.
It all came to her.
She realized her ego had been knocked out from having been unwittingly caught in the punch line of a devious joke, struck by the spiteful brunt of a most ruthless prankster that had ultimately proved to be shrewder than she.
The lady placed her dainty digits upon her cheeks.
She screamed in Horror.
The painful shrill echoed throughout the curvy enclosure of the flying silver craft.
The woman maliciously clenched her teeth and cocked her quivering head slightly upward, her Eyes widening as panic struck her hard.
