Prodigies

The Great City had fooled the kings of the earth with her seduction. She had taught the very rich and the very powerful and those souls who lusted after such things to dance with her, and share in the deliciousness of her goods. This was the center of it all, the beating heart of the ‘Great Satan’ (so called by his like minded). Each day its pulse rang with the bells of the NYSE, where everything imaginable was traded and controlled, bought and sold, including the souls of the infidels. It rang from the bells of the churches where its people worshipped, one hour a week, seeking forgiveness in fine clothing more for what they didn’t do than for what they did. They were drunk. Not Zatir. He had been taught by the acts of 2001 that the Great Satan was as naked as she was powerful. 

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Actually, the device itself was quite simple. Zatir’s allies had secured the grapefruit sized piece of Plutonium long ago, from a dying man whose nation had dissolved as if by magic after fighting the values of The Great Satan for decades. The Plutonium was carefully surrounded by a soccer ball sized piece of Uranium, and then painstakingly connected by dozens of narrow tubes which were loaded with Tritium, a very simple triple compound of hydrogen, actually.

The great difficulty had been in obtaining the tiny timing devices and their firing mechanisms, called krytons. The art of the game is in the timing. If the krytons don’t go off within a nanosecond of each other, the Tritium doesn’t explode fast enough to rush down the tubes past the Uranium, into the Plutonium, beginning the explosion simultaneously on all parts of the warhead. Synchronicity is power. Time the firing wrong, and the yield then goes from a Megaton to 100 kilotons, or something much less, which would leave more of The Great Satan untouched.

And the events of 2001 had taught Zatir’s people well that to get the attention of this system took a great deal, for they were drunk with power. So had been the Romans! he thought. But time was short, now – the earth was dying, his people were suffering. This had to be a clean shot.

Unfortunately for the people of the Rich North, and especially for the people of New York City, Zatir’s handlers had been very good at their craft, and the satellites did not detect the radiation signature in the container on the deck of a large freighter that August night when it reached its final destination.

The device exploded, along with the martyr named Zatir, on a Monday morning, at 9:11 A.M., on a September 11^th, on a clear late summer day. It was an awful, magnificent, terrible device, and it went off without a hitch, with maximum explosive power, actually with the destructive force of slightly more than one million sticks of dynamite.    

Actually, the heat force of the blast was all it took to get the job done. In one-fifth of one second, over 1,700,000 souls were incinerated, from Battery Park to the northern edges of Harlem, east and west across the bridges and rivers.          

By the end of the first second, the destruction extended beyond the island to The Bronx, Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn. By five seconds, as the waves spread death to New Rochelle and Hoboken and east through Nassau and Suffolk counties, the death toll eclipsed 6 million. The fierce flash of the burst was even seen by those inside their homes as far away as Philadelphia and Boston. Zatir would have been pleased to know that even these very gardens of this rebellious culture tasted the steel of the scimitar of his god as well.

And as the news spread of the destruction of The Great City, the kings of the earth cried, lamenting the greatness that had just, in seconds, come to naught. They watched her image, saw her smoke rising, feeling her travail, fearing her anger. And they said to one another, and all the people of the world, what great city is this, destroyed in a flash, who glorified herself as none before and none after ever will? So much wealth, so many lives, so many seekers, so many dreams, believers in the system of the Rich North – personal liberty and the accumulation of wealth - all come to ruin at the hands of Zatir Muhammed Quddus.

And never again would the heart of the Rich North beat strongly again, as it once had,

before The Great City was fallen. This event would bring far, far worse than the last.

The first casualty back in 2001 had been freedom itself, as it had been known throughout the Rich North. Replacing freedom came the systems of control, the dehumanizing of the Rich North’s true seekers. First it was a national identification system, along with the crude tools of truth detection, simple devices like codes, retina maps, DNA strands, pictures, holograms, diodes and magnetic strips. These were each compromised soon enough, as all ciphers will eventually be cracked, as surely as they can be designed.

Then came the ultimate meeting of man with machine, a worldwide personal identification system. This had proven to be the final undoing of the Rich North, and of its elusive freedom and “Way Of Life”.

What took 19 men with four airplanes three hours to accomplish back in 2001, had barely dented by 1 percent a 10 trillion dollar economy. Globalization gained momentum as nations closed ranks behind the race for security, having and holding the riches of the North, conserving the advantages which the kings of the North shared with their peoples, and those who lived according to their rules.