Satellites
The year is 1752 when a Syphilitic drunkard flies a kite through a New England thunderstorm and discovers the great God of electricity. Our beloved, portly whoremonger will go on to forge a great many treaties, bed a great many beauties, and die in his sleep racked with a great many STDs.
The year is 30,752 when a thunderstorm looms over the now molten plains of Neo New England.
Here, a goblin elder straps his youngest child, Benjamin, to the rusted shell of a fallen weather satellite.
The technology required to return this fallen weather God back to the heavens has long been forgotten. But the ceremony, bastardized by twenty thousand millennia of butchered retellings, remains.
With the help of his clan, the goblin elder raises the satellite upwards, and Benjamin, the sacrificial son, remains fastened to its base.
“Will we meet again?” the young goblin bellows to the crowd of onlookers below.
“For certain,” says the elder, “for it is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die…but retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.”
At this exclamation, a lightning bolt hurls down from the heavens, strikes the satellite, and immolates dear Benjamin into dust.
Freighters
The year is 1992 when a Chinese freighter gets caught in an arctic storm along the Bering Strait. There, in the tempestuous waters of the North Pacific, a cargo container slides off the deck and releases 28,000 rubber ducks into the sea.
Within a year the ducks float their way to every coastal corner of the earth, showing up on beaches from Mumbai to Mogadishu to Malibu.
It is a cold summer day in 8643 when the last inhabitants of the east bay colonies march on the neo-feudal capital of San Francisco. This will mark the final siege in a century-long holy war against the city, where the body of God, enshrined in the last rubber duck on earth, is said to reside. The invaders breach the city’s gates but are met with fierce resistance.
The next day, there are no survivors left to survey the carnage. But if there were, they would behold a lone turkey vulture picking at the entrails of the defense’s eviscerated captain.
“Such is the circle of life,” the survivor might utter to themselves, perhaps wiping the enemy’s blood from their furrowed brow. Then, of course, the survivor would make for the catacombs, where the buoyant yellow body of God surely lies in wait.