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Carlos was at a meeting deep inside a basement room four stories below the sex-workers, the sewers, and the underground power conduits. He was four stories beneath the food vendors, and exotic vapor bars of the Free Economic Zone, with twenty one men and two women who sat in an EM shielded room, around a transparent, molded plastic table on transparent, molded plastic chairs.
The people sitting around the table were representatives from the many insurgent groups operating in Baccha Bay City. Members of the Morituri, White Sunday, Angry Angels, Sons of Abraham, Sons of Samson, Angels of Badur, Eastern Front, Korean Christian Militia, Protestant National Militia, Chinese Christians, Shiva's Wrath, The Word, and others sat around the table. The room was filled with religious fundamentalists, fanatics, criminals, homicidal lunatics, and a difficult to define, hybridized combination of the above that was rarely seen before the G.S.A.'s criminalization of religion.
A well-known, borrowed saying went, “When religion is criminalized, only criminals will have religion.” Two decades of repression had weeded out the moderate thinkers. The moderates hid or were 'reeducated' and publicly recanted. The rest became radicalized. The faithful of Baccha Bay City were not all murderers and terrorists, but many of their militants, leaders, and representatives were. These were the people that conducted the ongoing insurgent war with the Global Secular Alliance, and they were a bloody-minded lot.
At the request of his client, Carlos brought two things to the underground meeting. The first was a live, but humiliated Padre Pedro, both as a show of his client's good faith, and also to trade with the Morituri for a promise to no longer pursue the Buddha. The second thing Carlos brought with him was a holographic recording of a three-foot-tall, highly anthropomorphised Chinese Monkey.
It carried a staff, wore monk's robes, and a gold band around its head. As it walked about the center of the oval table, waves of static and gaussian noise passed over it every few seconds. Many times it invoked the name of a place that did not yet exist, but brought glorious visions to the minds of the insurgent leaders who listened with rapt attention. “New Jerusalem,” the Monkey said, “will be built here.”
The major military action proposed by the simian promised the realization of a dream they all shared – driving Global Secular Alliance forces from Baccha Bay City.
What the Monkey proposed would require a cooperation they'd never even attempted, and it was risky, but the reward was inspiring – a cathedral, a temple, a mosque, a grand unified fortress of belief they would keep as their own and call New Jerusalem.
The Monkey promised them the Ziggurat.
The price was high and it would be paid in blood, but if the battle were won, then nobody wanted to be the group that was left outside the Ziggurat's smoky-pink, transparent walls without a claim to any part of it. Nobody could risk being left outside the walls of New Jerusalem, even if it required them to ally themselves with those whose beliefs were, by their very existence, an affront to their own.
None of them thought the Ziggurat could ever be shared among the different groups of believers, and most of the group's leaders were already planning to slaughter the others after the battle had been won. If the G.S.A. were defeated, then a dozen smaller battles would ensue, each group attempting to take the prize for their own.
They all sat silent as the Monkey orated. “Victory promises far more than driving the G.S.A. out of one city and taking the G.S.A.'s Ziggurat as a fortress of faith. Victory is an opportunity to bring inspiration to those who wage war against the G.S.A. across the globe. The Ziggurats are in every major city, in every member nation. They are the symbols of G.S.A. dominance and permanence, and if just one falls, if the world sees the G.S.A. driven from one of their own pyramids, then everything changes.
“Victory shows the world that the G.S.A. is not invulnerable. Victory demonstrates that the G.S.A. can be driven, city by city, from homelands across the globe. Victory makes it conceivable, for the first time since its formation, that the member nations might withdraw from the Global Secular Alliance. Imagine the neutered national governments turning their remaining military might to fight for freedom, at our sides. Victory offers hope that the people of many nations can return to nationalist freedom and once again enjoy the sovereign right to choose their own paths, including the path of faith.” The Monkey paused, and its tail swished left and right in the silence.
“Victory offers Hope for the freedom we do not have, and it requires Faith in the unseen. The Battle for New Jerusalem is fought Today, and it will be fought with you or without you. The wheels are already in motion and they cannot be stopped. The battle has already begun. I hand you Hope; Faith turns it to Victory.”
The three-foot-tall, gold-banded Monkey vanished in a puff of quickly fading, jade green smoke. In the Monkey's place floated slowly rotating coordinates in Place and Time, designating an early morning rendezvous, roughly in the center of the Bay.