Agonie sits with Monk in the back of the Scrapyard, a nightclub and community center built by Johnny Motormouth. The Scrapyard is situated in an area of San Judas without electricty or running water. The Scrapyard has become the logistical base of Alexander's Death Battalion, who are planning the assasination of the president of San Judas with the assistance of a state AI called Butterhead Rex. Agonie is a local of San Judas. Monk's origin is unknown. Motormouth came from Louisiana. 

  

         "You don't even tell me when you leave and then you show up when you need me", Johhny was saying to a sleepy Agonie reposed in a thick leather couch, with a tone more charming than accusatory. "I'm not saying you're not good for business, I'm not saying anything." Agonie opened her eyes and lazily looked around until her gaze fell on Motormouth. Her pupils focused on his until he looked away, exasperated, and she raised her eyebrows with an amused gesture of condescension, and closed her eyes again, pulling her knees up and settling into the couch with the mechanics of a grumpy old feline. Monk, sitting on a milk crate with the posture of a bowed birch tree, had been watching Agonie with the expression of a child of six watching their mother tuck them into bed, leaned forward, took Agonie's right hand which had been folded across her belly, a hand of such elegant length and curvature that it brought to mind some Plutonion royalty, as though it were the hand of an ancient race that had been preserved in the frigid emptiness of the outer worlds, yet it was always suprisingly warm to the touch, and kissed her knuckles with a solemn bow, as though Monk were a favoured Jewish slave kissing the golden hand of a Pharoah, an event which Monk very well may have been recreating from memory. Straightening their back and turning to face Johnny, who had been observing this lost ritual through the thick blue smoke he blew from his nostrils, the little Monk offered,

   "Johnny, what happened when you cycled through your 23rd year? You felt wetness on your lips and cured the incurable through plasticity? or was it a grounding ineffectivity bringing you gently to sleep...you know she'll gladly take you sideways(look, she already sleeps)at a lazy hour on any last Sunday, yet you push, and squeeze, if I were otherwise I belive you'd have even me squirming." 
   "Monk, buddy, your arm is bleeding" said Johnny. 
   "And if it were up to me it would bleed until they put me in a 20th century circus crosslegged in a kiddie pool on display for the great people of central Texas with a sign that read  'SEE THE HEMOPHILIAC DWARF TRANSVESTITE THAT LIVES IN ENDLESS SUFFERING'. And that reminds me, sweet Johnny, how are you holding up? This place has turned into a regular Jinggangshan."
   "Shit. I duno Monk. I mean it's same shit to me. These kids think they'uh slicker'n owl shit like robocop aint listenin on every goddam thing we said, an' Alexander's bunch think ain't nobody ever tried'a do what they ain't even did yet , hollerin bout ain't no compromise on principle when they'ain been old enough long enough to say the goddam word 10 years. It's all talk Monk, you know it is an' I know I seen the shit a hunned times. or maybe it jus start feelin that way. Say that remind me, my daddy says one day, he say, 'now boy, look euh, nah I'm tired of giving you tha switch ever day, an I belive ah done gave you jus about how many lashes my pa give me in ma day', but my daddy he say 'I know you gon keep on gon how ye gon, so iah give ya dis one more switch to put the fear on ya, so's you rememba, but afta that ya gon hafta jus rememba, on accountah im tired', an believe me when ah tell yeh he was tired, f0r he did'n make it but anotha six month. You want a drink?"
   Monk gave a hardly audible mmh, but Motormouth had known Monk long enough to know that the mystical, leisurely person seated on that crate would always take a drink, and that no matter how strong it was poured or how many they'd had, the little Monk would always be completely unaffected by alcohol's effects. 
    Johnny prepared them two absinthes, distilled by him using a family recipe which used 13 herbs, grown by Johnny on the roof of the Scrapyard, that went back at least two centuries, and slowly dripping cold water from the copper brouilleur over the strong liqour, coloured as though it contained in its atomic makeup the mystical iridescent sorrow of the full moon, said over his shoulder to Monk, "You get that feeling?".
   "Which feeling, darling."
   "That you seen the shit a hunned times."
   "Mmmh. No, I don't experince that feeling. But you, Johnny, surely you've seen what you've seen a great many times more than one hundred? Old man in your prime, you who could perform your clandestine alchemy with both eyes closed and a third dreamily unfocused on a horizon of repose? You who could lazily observe the slow delta rivers with your feet up until Christ came home to roost, but instead have put your feet down to the soil and built a monument to Community, have constructed machines from memory which nobody remembers, and have learned the true meaning of charity? Johnny, who taught you these things...you'll say your father, your aunts, but were they not astounded at your capacity to absorb and possess knowledge? no, you were reminded how to do these things, for as you suggest, you've seen this shit many times before."
   "Now tha's a different game though. You build a engine and it aint nothin gettin that engine runnin but how ya built it. I mean these kids, Monk. I seen a lotta organ-i-zations and I seen ever one of em fall 'part, and it ain't one of em fell 'part different than how any other of 'em did. An I seen a lotta pol'ticians too an ever one of em turned to shit. It don't factor how they get in-to the game, ever one of em come out the rear end lookin and smellin jus' alike, like dog shit. An I'm tellin you Monk, I seen the shit enough times I know how it look when it go in the mouth, an this kid Alexander, he a politician throughsome and gruesome, and these Death Battalion kids 'at talk like they'uh just do what he say when he say do it, they playing that organ-i-zation game. An I tell you this too, Monk, you wrong to say I seen what I seen even more than one hunned times, 'cus I din' re-alize till just now but I belive this is the hun-dredth time I'uh ever watch such a thing happen to such a people. I believe next time, and this is the truth an I'uh put that on the Mis'sipp River herself, next time them pol'ticians an them kids start talkin bout that same old shit I seen now one-hun-dred-and-one times, I'uh tellem shut the fuck up, God bless you, an I'uh do just as you say Monk, I'uh go right back where I come from, I'uh set my feet up on a damn bucket, an I'uh shut the fuck up myself until my mother's lord and saviour Jesus H. Christ come home to roost."
   The little Monk's breath quickened slightly, a thing which happened extremely rarely for the perfectly composed individual, and perhaps what brought it on for more than one cycle of breath was the awareness that, in this sixth week of the year 2056, Monk had experienced a great many sensations which were alien to them. These sensations themselves were perfectly regular mechanisms of a human nervous system, and that precisely made them alien. Monk was a true creature of three dimensions that intersect with a fourth. If we describe a fourth dimension within our boundaries of language, a three dimensional being may only experience one precise point of the fourth dimension at any moment. That is to say the present, which can not be measured by a unit of time because it is instantaneous, and not the past or future, which incidentally also cannot be measured by any unit of time because they are infinite. The unique curse of the human mind is it's exploratory, desiring to map the world around it, and this includes the dimension of time. The human mind reaches into the past and future with psychic tendrils, hoping that it may find context for its position in time. Monk had, by no particular effort of their own but by the result of their soul travelling the surface of this planet for unknown aeons, the ability which comes so naturally to so many sub-human Earth creatures, of being absolutely engrossed in their immediate surrounding and sensations. The small creature did not reach into the past to find context for the present. For Monk, memories did not appear as the strange three dimensional simulations of reality which the human mind can conjure up, but as raw electric data giving association to objects deep in the recesses of their subconscious. 
   "Perhaps," started Monk, after a pause, with a tiny treble of unease in their voice, "perhaps you will not be waiting for that child-god for as long as your desire to rest would have it, and perhaps the last 'messiah is coming' has already been uttered from Ashkenazi lips."
   Motormouth Johnny heard these words, and as was his nature when talking to the little Monk did not attempt to deciper or translate them but held onto whichever word or phrase held the most association to his own world-illusion, in this case the phrase 'god-child'. These words held no association, in Johnny's consciousness, to the Palestinian Jew who was tortured and crucified two millenia previously, but brought his thoughts and feelings instead to the young woman sleeping five feet across from him on a very sturdy and very old leather sofa. Johnny was, without a doubt, in love with Agonie. Them being being the two most famous persons in the surrounding area, his love-infatuation had become the subject of much gossip within the Scrapyard neighborhood. Johnny's dog-like nature was never more apparent than in his dealings with Agonie, and the raw simplicity of his emotions toward her were such that he was unable to hide them with social subtlety when in public. A glance from her was no minor ecstacy for Johnny, and a touch from her extraordinary hands could leave his chest breathless and his face rather dumb. Naturally--Johnnie being more than double Agonie's age--his feelings towards her were gossiped about in way which vilified Johnny, casting him as a hungry wolf rather than the satisfied old bloodhound he truly was. Undeniably there was an erotic aspect of his magnetic feelings for her, and Agonie gave no particular effort to curtail this. In fact she opened her flowering eros-nerve up to him more than she had ever done with a human, and Johnny was utterly defenseless to this. However, no uncertainty whatsoever existed between them as to whether the actual act of sex was a possible outcome of their relationship. It was not. For Agonie, who was accutely aware of the boundary between fantasy and reality, the reality of sex was actually apalling to her. Also the fact that she possesed power over the most powerful person within 10 square miles was not something she took lightly, and she knew that this power relied upon not letting herself become entirely human to him. For Johnny a sex-outcome wasn't possible because the sex-rooted feelings he experienced towards her body were entirely overpowered by the religious, culto feelings evoked in him by her psychic demeanor, feelings rooted neither in the body nor mind but in the spiritual-cosmic immaterial liquid which was Johnny Motormouth's soul. In the twelve months that he had known her she'd become a genuine deity to him. Johnny's nervio religioso was essentially polytheistic; nothing about his conscious experience told him that the nature of reality was one, and therefore a singular creator-god did not exist for him. A god, for Johnny, was something like a river, or a very old tree, or the wind, or even an exceptionally powerful machine like the hot rods built by his moonshiner great-great-great-grandparents of the 1920s, but never in all his 56 years had Johnny met a god who was also a human. 
   And, whether by the magnetic power of his thoughts as he contemplated the 'god-child' who he had come to love so deeply or by a simple coincidence of chance, Agonie awoke suddenly. She awoke in the way that one might when they hear a disturbing sound in their house; eyes flashing open suddenly with a look in them as though they had been awake all the while behinds closed lids, but body staying perfectly still. Agonie looked straight forward, beyond Monk and Johnny, beyond the maze-like tin walls and halls of the Scrapyard, beyond the surrounding neighborhood, pitch black under the new-moon save for some scattered evenings fires, beyond the sprawling endlessness of San Judas with it's horrifically tall skyscrapers standing like sentinels, beyond the toxic blue haze thickened by the February heat wave, beyond the thinning atmosphere and past the planets to the great cosmic drapes and folds of Athena's tapestry. This astrological tapestry was, in the Universe in which Agonie operated, was that which gave boundary to existence, and therefore gave order and reason. It was Athena's gift to the mortals- that they may be shielded from forces so astronomical that for a Human mind to even perceive one would have the biblical consquence of "looking upon the face of God". This tapestry, being ancient, had trillions on tiny holes in it, where the light of the God-Forces shined through as stars. What awoke our hero, however, was not the shimmer in the fabrick which was wont to happen occasionally. There was a rip.