“All hail, King Kill.”
Endless numbers, signifying anything, floated red and green across the mammoth screen that was the wall. These did not scroll like those at the stock exchange, but danced, one derivative leading another. It was an ingenious index, tracking more than fluctuations, but flux itself, and the warbling integers that peopled it moved in mystery. In front of that, heading up the boardroom’s long table, was the monstrous egregore.
Once, the kings and priests in Babylon had been satisfied with less. The presence of portentous winds on top of ziggurats, or statues speaking in an astral voice of star sent origin, that had been enough to prove the god. Things could be believed more readily then. But fancy falters. For the modern cabal, the tulpic center of attention had to join thought with form.
“All hail, King Kill,” again erupted from every mouth. The board bowed their heads and commenced to low humming, shaman tones.
Just as the manifesting of a psychic god in physic-form marked this assembly as too crudely material, so their chosen name for that god showed them to be shallow. The name was a thoughtless transference of act to entity, quite unlike the YHWH name they hated. Whereas YHWH named Himself blooming-being Absolute, these balding, wheezing, liver-spotted money men named their god with mocking inverse reaction. First they reacted to the act they practiced, over-thinking human ritual until the practice was a thing worth worshiping; and then they justified that transference with a system, a system so fragile and slight that ritual had to be added onto ritual, until their technic god was insulated inside a labyrinth of thoughts.
They professed that their god’s name was received, sent from the outer depths and presented to them as the self-created title of an ungotten being, but in fact it was the group that conjured, assigned, venerated it.
“All hail, King Kill.”
And there was another aspect, another diabolic revel. They thought it so fitting that their living god was hewn from death.
“All hail, King Kill.”
From the shadows near the doorway, the CEO’s son rolled his decrepit father’s body forward in its chair. The old man was very spent, the hospice and the doctors had kept him living well beyond his time.
His every breath presaged a death rattle, so shakily did he commune with the atmosphere. The air almost rejected him. His lungs were rotten, gangrened with hate and the acids that bubbled in his stomach as a fired cauldron overflows. His form was shriveled, coiled beneath his blanket, and sweated a total film of sweat. His son, not mournful, steadily took his father around the room. One by one, the members of the board anti-anointed him, touching droplets of their own fluids, excrements, ejaculates, to his forehead. After a circuit, he was deposited at the end of the table.
“All hail, King Kill.”
That old man shifted slightly in his chair. He was framed by the colossus construction behind him, into which he would shortly be assembled, and the glow of the supernatural stock ticker. Eerie electric luminescence silhouetted the god and the sacrifice, casting both in the same computer hue.
With some straining, the CEO rattled past the phlegm that inwards coated him and wheezed what almost was a word. The whole board leaned forwards, and listened.
“I think…”
Geriatric tension kept these sounds inside his throat. He had not spoken clearly in many years, and the effort tore at his vocal cords. “I think that…”
The Vice President of overseas operations offered a glass of water, but the CEO hastily blinked a silent no. The old man’s son, who had already grabbed the bloodstained massive hammer from the foot of the egregore, twirled it behind his father’s impotent head, swaying with impatience.
“I think that next year’s Q1 earnings won’t be very good.” The CEO let that linger. “We should look to diversify our holdings in central Asia, and consider…” His voice trailed away into pained silence. Everyone stared, tried not to move. With effort, “… Consider looking at what a short on lithium would mean long term, as far as futures go.”
The CEO gasped what air he could through asthmatic resistance. He searched his feebleness for something else to say, any final thought that lay beneath the wisps of gray dotting his scalp, that grew spores of any import on the inside of his skull. Deciding that there were none, he breathed deep, felt the cake of snot touch the back of his tongue, and with a foul final exhalation said:
“All hail, King Kill!”
“All hail, King Kill!” Bellowed the rest.
In an instant, the eager son had driven down the mallet into his father’s skull, crushed the bone into jagged splinters, and sprayed soft stuff across the long table. Two analysts immediately rose to inspect the goo and derive what auguries they might from the bloody gush.
The CEO’s son and the VP lifted the limp body from its spot and laid it flat, and in turns the whole board commenced to flaying flesh off of the corpse.
The bones were set aside with an air of careful adoration, and sorted neatly into categories. The work of adding this CEO’s bits to the egregore would now begin. That ossified monster would be reverently disassembled, and new limbs would be grafted onto his. The CEO’s ribs would join the others, and so enlarge that towering assemblage. Femur to femurs, spine to spines, so on with every joint and all the marrow.
It was a great accumulation, a monument of reserve and preserve. A total accrue, that King— fashioned from thought and grown on rotting growth— kept for itself the most persevering parts. Its head, which was in fact a knot of skulls forming a spider’s tessellated eye, overlooks the board with grim objectivity.
The members will sometimes toast that bony mass, and fondly cheers the old man thus:
“All hail, King Kill!”
— Eitan Benzion is a writer with an interest in philosophy, magic, technology, and conspiracy. He lives in a southwest ventricle of Uncle Sam’s cybernetic heart.