by Philip Mason
It is seventeen years after the world-wide holocaust was brought on by Earth being covered in semen. The state of the world is still madness, chaos, widespread loss and panic. The world population remains at an all time low as far as recorded history is concerned, though no one knows exactly what the number is. The population density is the lowest it’s been in millions of years, with the few survivors scattered all across the planet. Reproduction levels are not high, for fear of raising children in a harsh world few have become accustomed to is rampant. Few governments have formed, none have lasted long enough to erect power. No one will allow themselves to be governed in the new world. Things are different. Resources remain scarce, rivers are not rivers of water but rivers of mud cum, tributaries into larger bodies of semen sludge. When it rains, people gather water as well as they can. Any water that hits the ground is mixed with dried cum and becomes difficult to use. Some have developed methods to separate water from the cum, but they are cumbersome and not widely known. Death by dehydration and starvation are still problems that humankind faces each day. Violence and cruelty still exist in the world, as do love and kindness.
Edgar is a seventeen year old boy, part of the generation known as DCs - or Doomsday Children. The DCs are the children born of the women impregnated by the semen that covered the planet on what is now commonly referred to as Doomsday. The day is called other names by some, but “Doomsday” and its variations are most prevalent. Each DC is seventeen years old, sharing birthdays within a few days of one another.
It is not known how many DCs are alive on Earth, but some estimate there are thousands. Many DCs turned to cannibalism at a certain young age, the cause of which no one has understood. Many DCs died young, or at birth. Most DCs have killed in their lifetime, many have killed great numbers of people. The DCs who have made it to seventeen years of age are strong, the fittest of their kind.
Edgar has no friends and no family. He was raised by his mother and older sister until he was nine. He became cannibalistic at this age and destroyed his mother, and cut up his sister and sold her parts to traders he met as he traveled from wasteland to wasteland. Since that young age, Edgar has survived on his own, encountering foes along his life’s path, defeating some of them, and being defeated by others. He has killed other DCs in battle, eaten their corpses, and sold their bones to architects and carpenters. At the age of thirteen Edgar was attacked by a family and his skin was removed from his legs and his arms were broken. He was left to die in the hot sun, somewhere in what had been Arizona before Doomsday. But luck would smile upon Edgar, for he was discovered by a caravan of salesmen and traders who had with them two doctors. Edgar was fixed up and allowed to recover with the traders as they continued to ride across the country. He learned skills from the salesmen and traders, as well as medical knowledge from the doctors. By fifteen he was on his own again, wandering and surviving.
Religion in the new world is rare. Any belief in God died on Doomsday for most survivors. God is sometimes spoken of today, but as a different figure. DCs speak of a God – they call him Father. God, to them, is their father, the man whose ejaculate spawned them – flowed through their mother’s bodies and created them in a time of near extinction and mass death. The father is a destroyer and a creator. But none know who he is. It is impossible to say. For the last seventeen years, explorers and scientists, the few who have survived, have tried to pinpoint the location of the origin of the world-ending ejaculation. None have found anything.
Having been taught to read up to age nine, and then being taught for two years in the caravan, Edgar possesses a greater literacy than the average DC. It is still an inadequate ability compared to educated people, but he can understand what he needs to. A phrase he had read years ago has stuck in his memory to this day. The phrase is: “To Kill God, You Must Kill Man.” As a child, Edgar was taught what God was. It was a being who created everything and everyone, an entity from mythology.
To Kill God You Must Kill Man. Edgar understands the phrase. God existed only in the minds of the people who believed in him. So to kill God you must kill the idea of God. An idea can only be killed by killing every last trace of that idea. This would require the murder of every person who believed in God. But modern people do not believe in God the way they did seventeen years ago. Now God – Father – exists in a different form. God is the father of the DCs. The father of today’s Doomsday Children is God. No one knows him, no one ever can. But Edgar wants to know who it is. And Edgar is pulled by the quotation from his past to kill God.
When DCs are together, perhaps in a collective or small bands that have been known to form, it becomes apparent that many of them share physical features. The facial structure of many is similar. Hair color and eye color are similar. Voices are sometimes similar. Boys and girls alike share common features because they all have the same father. They are all half-siblings. All are the same age, and many look almost identical, despite their different mothers.
Enough study of the commonalities in facial features of the DCs might allow one to determine the face of God, the face of the father, Edgar thinks. His wish is to find the face of the father and to learn his identity. In that way, Edgar can kill the father. For this father, this God, does not merely exist in the mind of believers, like past gods - but might even be alive on planet Earth. DCs are a violent, primitive, uneducated bunch – Edgar knows there is no way to communicate his curiosity to them. Cooperation is not an option.
To Kill God You Must Kill Man. To Kill God You Must See God. To See God You Must Kill Man. Edgar spends his time hunting and capturing his fellow DCs. When he has them, he kills them by decapitation. He collects their heads and eats their bodies, leaving the remnants for bugs and animals. The heads are stored in locations that only he knows, and the faces are removed by methods he was taught by the doctors in the caravan years ago. He is creating a library of faces – the faces of his half brothers and half sisters. He wants to see God’s face.
Edgar has collected the heads and faces of over one thousand of his half-siblings. The faces of dead DCs are mounted on the walls of his strange home. A mostly destroyed shipping facility on the outskirts of what was once Silicon Valley has become Edgar’s residence. Sketches fill notebooks that Edgar has acquired, and he tries with untrained hands to accurately draw the face of his father using shared traits among all the faces he positions to stare at his own. When not decapitating DCs and removing their faces, or sketching in his notebook, Edgar walks among the white cum-statues of dead humans, solidified for seventeen years as vertical corpses, harsh reminders of Doomsday’s casualties. These statues stand all around the world. On occasion, Edgar will chisel through a cum-statue’s hardened semen coat to dig out the corpse from inside. He will use the mostly preserved corpse as a model for the faces he has collected. He tries to model God. This lasts until the corpse begins to decompose and Edgar must dispose of it. He sends the corpse into a cum river, washed away into a bleak whiteness. Forgotten again.
Each day Edgar wonders if he will see the face of the father. His sketches are beginning to converge to a common image. It shares plenty in common with his own face, but also exhibits traits he does not possess, but that many of the faces share. It has been hard for Edgar to find anymore DCs for quite some time. He travels for days just to find signs of other human life, and travels weeks in order to track DCs. But they are becoming scarce. He has killed most of the DCs he finds.
But some DCs have been lucky, and have severely wounded Edgar after his attacks. Edgar has recently lost an arm from a battle that did not go his way. Able to prevent himself from bleeding to death, and fighting the infections that developed, Edgar barely made his way all the way back home. A missing limb will severely damage his ability to hunt DCs. His sketching has become less clear. He stores his cut-off arm in a box of ice. Ice is hard to come by in this new world, but slightly moistened cum-crust allows any chamber of ice to be properly sealed to hold in the cold.
The source of Edgar’s favorite quote is not known. He does not know who first said, “To Kill God You Must Kill Man,” but it is not important to him. He contemplates further the implications of the quote. Once a man has hunted the believers of God long enough, does he perhaps see himself as God’s Assassin? He is killing off the very existence of God. Edgar is killing off the descendents of God in order to see God, to see his father. But his picture is not complete. If the Godkiller wishes to fully kill God, must he not then kill himself? He will be the last person to know of the belief in God, and in order to secure a future where the God is not known, he must end his own life. Edgar begins to wonder if he must kill himself to finish his work. But the God Edgar wants to kill is not the mythological God of the past. It is the father who made him.
He will not be able to kill God fully. There are DCs all over the world, and Edgar will never be able to find and kill all of them. Instead of killing his father, Edgar might try to come to know his father, effectively becoming his father, and then acting appropriately. To fully know his father, Edgar thinks, he must destroy. The father was a destroyer and a creator. Edgar has created the face of the father in his notebook, but now he must destroy. Killing other DCs is a good start but there has to be more. Edgar is the final DC he is aware of. He has put himself in the place of the father. All that he has learned has led him here - as a face staring back at the other faces. "If father is not known, then who is to say I am not the father? Am I God?" Edgar wonders. It is time to kill himself.
After fashioning a guillotine from parts he has horded over years of travel and exploration, and sharpening the blade to precision, Edgar puts his head in the path of the blade. To Kill God You Must Kill Yourself. Edgar eats the flesh from his frozen, bodiless arm as a final meal. Below where his head shall land, he has placed the stacks of faces he has collected from fellow DCs. It is time to join them. His face will add yet a further degree of detail to the face of the unknown father. Edgar pulls the rope and the blade drops, severing his head from his body. It rolls into the pile of faces of over a thousand other seventeen year old Doomsday Children. Edgar has done his part in the search for the father.
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