H Trope: Ghost stories…
David stepped into the house long-abandoned by his great-grandparents.
Still standing after the most recent clashes between Israel, Palestine, and what his great-grandmother and her parents called, “The Annihilator of the Jews”, former UN President Alija Suleiman Muhammad Umar, now King of the Restored Umayyad Caliphate, which controlled the majority of oil left on Earth. As a Canadian citizen, he was entirely welcome in the Caliphate. As the American citizen he ACTUALLY was, he’d have been forbidden to set foot in the Middle East.
He sighed. There wasn’t really much left of their home – though he recognized a few things. The dining table that could easily seat sixteen adults. High overhead, the shelf that had held family heirlooms away from questing child hands. He smiled. When he became a man at thirteen, he’d been allowed to climb the long ladder and, taking each relic and climbing cautiously back down, he’d listened as whatever adult was nearby, give a concise (great-grandfather was NOT so concise, though his stories were full of wonder!) tale of where the object began and how it came into their hands.)
Eventually, they’d end up in the Hall of Paintings – and more recently, Holograms; and after a gift from his researcher uncle, the holograms were animated and semi-sentient. Those were his favorites.
After the Second Lightning War, funded by a conglomeration of backers who believed that the Jews had discovered and then appropriated the technology that allowed the manipulation of gravity, most of Jerusalem had fallen into ruin and continued to decay. He sighed and reached out to take hold of a rung of the ladder. Only seven steps remained, but he held them gingerly as if they would break away if he sneezed on them.
At that idea, he sneezed.
“Bless you,” said a voice. It wasn’t a Human voice – he was considered the most skilled Speech/Voice Recognition Technologist in the Solar Commonwealth – besides, it had spoken in Old Hebrew.
David said, “Who is that?” The voice echoed back in Old Hebrew. David spoke again in American English.
The voice said, “Who would you say that I am?”
David made a face, the said, “Very funny. You’re obviously some sort of joker…”
“I am not,” the voice said in Old Hebrew.
David scowled. Shaking his head, he replied in the same language, “First guess is that you’re the ghost of Christmas Past.”
The voice hummed, then replied in 20th Century English instead, “Remarkably close. I am the voice of an AI who has come to visit disaster on a world that mocks and assumes it’s better than any society that has evolved on Earth – and any society that will ever arise on this planet. I am the Ruach of Vengeance…”
Event: https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/ghosts-of-a-holy-war-the-1929-massacre-in-palestine-that-ignited-the-arab-israeli-conflict
Names: ; ♂ David Shainberg ♀ Ruach ("spirit" or "wind", usually, “ghost”), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Jerusalem
Image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51niGRrH6DL.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment