Sacrifice

It wanted to sacrifice one of the new iPads. You know, the whole deal – candles, pentagrams, incantations – with a shiny slab of glass and metal ‘designed in California’ sitting right there in the middle of it all. Not working of course. (The whole ‘eons of darkness’ thing was bit of an own goal in retrospect). But that didn’t stop the ceremony going ahead. The end result was a small, charred pile of glass and metal. Pretty much the exact same result as the attempts with the iPad 2, the iPad and the various iPhones we had tried.

At least the Apple gizmos were physical objects. I mean, geez, there was a hell of an argument when It wanted to sacrifice a sub-prime mortgage. How do you explain collateralised security to something which only has a loose concept of time? Let alone the idea of ‘commerce’. Didn’t matter. The name had been descryed so we had to sacrifice it. I think It was a bit disappointed when It saw just a small piece of paper on the altar. You can never tell what It’s feeling I know, but all those blood gutters had been hewed into the obsidian for a reason.

There was an easier run after that. The portrait of Mao from the Tienanmen Gate, the left hand of Christ the Redeemer, the Magna Carta. Don’t get me wrong, it was still pretty busy, but it wasn’t complicated like.

Global warming was tricky. How do you ritually disembowel four hundred and fifty parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere? An SUV? Too gauche. Carbon Trading Permits? That would just be the sub-prime disaster all over again. In the end we stuck a polar bear up there. It’s kind of symbolic I guess, and I thought some good old fashioned blood-letting might cheer It up a bit.

I still don’t know why terrorism came up. Good grief, It is literally the ‘Lord Of’. The whole place runs on terror; it’s our religion, our currency, our daily bread. And now it wanted to sacrifice it? I just didn’t know what to do.

‘I will be the sacrifice’ It said.

‘How can you sacrifice yourself? Kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it?’

‘Do you remember why we came here? What we did all this for?’

‘Doesn't matter.'

'Do you still love me?'

Gordon Bennett. Is that what this was all about? 'You're not my wife anymore. You're the Dark Lord.'

She smiled that smile that creased the corners of her soft blue eyes. She always knew my weaknesses. I picked up the knife.