The Elect

"Suzanne, dear, you should be happy for me," Scrap said into his PCD. "From humble beginnings to... well, to this moment. This happy moment! Tell me our parents would be proud. Tell me you're happy for your big brother."

"Fuck you," her tiny, hi-def image retorted.

Scrap smiled. "So feisty! But, sweetest little sister, you need to understand. They can only take the best humanity has to offer."

"In that case," his sister retorted, "bon voyage and good luck living on Venus."

"Not Venus," Scrap tutted. "Not even on our solar system. See, this is what I mean. You are so ignorant -- "

But she had closed the channel.

Scrap lifted his eyes to Jwanda, who stood slim and elegant at his elbow, sipping nectar from a tall flute. "So slow, and so dense," he told Jwanda. "I love her, but my god. No wonder she became a public school teacher. And she didn't even have the sense to marry well. She had proposals from two of the best men in the city, but - well, she married for love. And her wife isn't any better off. She works in a pauper's hospital."

Jwanda smiled spitefully. "Losers," she said.

"Rilly," Scrap responded, bored, mind already moving on to the next subject. "My god, can you believe her," he hissed under his breath.

Jwanda looked in the direction of his frown.

"No sense of how to dress at all. Sheer bottom with elaborate layered top? She looks like a mollusk."

The object of Scrap's scorn was a woman sporting a blouse done in black and white ruffles that cascaded voluptuously. Each layer's underside was finished in day-glow lime yellow. The top was actually quite striking, but then came the rest of her ensemble: Some sort of greenish-bronze skintight bottom, which reached to mid-calf length. She looked naked and discolored from the waist down. She was barefoot, enhancing the effect.

"Lars Elberhorn," sniffed Jwanda. "I can't stand his designs."

"Is he here?" a new voice asked. Both Scrap and Jwanda turned with indignation, greeting the newcomer with simultaneous exclamations of disgust.

"Hell, no," Jwanda snapped

"I should hope not!" huffed Scrap.

"Too bad," the newcomer said. He was tall - too tall to be natural; obviously he was gen-hanced, though whoever had done the biodesign had opted for length not only in torso and legs but face and fingers as well. The fellow looked absurd. But he, at least, dressed well, Scrap noticed.

"I should so like to see his face when they take... well, all the rest of us," the newcomer continued. "But, of course," he laughed, "I wouldn't! We'd be gone."

"Another real bright bulb," Jwanda muttered as the newcomer drifted into the crowd. The hubbub around them was getting louder as more guests arrived, and as they drank more, and as the hour of their Rapture grew closer.

***

The news had come via PCD, holofield, weblink, and every other communications avenue - all simultaneously. The lead ambassador of the Srolta had appeared and announced that the aliens had determined their efforts at terraforming Earth were falling behind. The Srolta had advised humankind time and again about their ongoing pollution, the lead ambassador said - with a pompous air typical of the Srolta, many agreed - but Earth's indigenous people had failed to heed their warnings. Outmoded industrial and agricultural practices continued to destroy arable land, contaminate water tables, ravage the seas, and unbalance the composition of the atmosphere. The Srolta had come as colonists, the lead ambassador continued, their original goal to terraform the planet Mars. They had delayed their project at great cost to themselves and diverted their resources to an attempt to repair Earth's planetary condition. But they had been unable to restore Earth to its former clement state; human beings had simply assumed that the Srolta would continue to work their technological magic and clean up the mess they generated.

Worse, the Srolta's lead ambassador continued, the pillaging of the planet's resources didn't even benefit the bulk of humanity, but profited only a tiny percentage of its inhabitants. Most humans were still poor, weak, and sick - victims of those who brazenly abused both the planet and the good will of its visiting benefactors. Willing victims, the Srolta lead ambassador said accusingly - people who simply deferred to the exploitative leadership of those who assumed their wealth conferred power over others. It was a situation the Srolta did not understand, did not condone, and could no longer enable.

The Srolta were leaving.

A collective gasp of shock echoed around the globe.

However, the lead ambassador went on to say, humanity had many promising qualities as well: Tenacity, ingenuity, the beginnings of authentic compassion, and a flair for creativity, especially in the storytelling arts. Human beings were not yet able to differentiate between reality and the fictions they so easily, ceaselessly spun - the human insistence upon framing so many of their bad choices as the "will" of a presupposed "god" was a central element of their catastrophic global problems - but the Srolta held out hope that sufficient racial maturation might occur over time... maybe a few hundred thousand years.

The Srolta leadership had conferred among themselves and determined that the root problem was that the development human intellect had outstripped the development of the human organism. Human impulses were still irrational and governed from the hardwired dictates of selfish genetics. If properly cultivated, human beings could very well evolve into responsible, contributing members of the galactic community. If simply abandoned, the race would promptly extinguish itself.

Rather than let that happen, the lead ambassador said, the Srolta were willing to continue their sponsorship of human survival... but not on a planetary level. Earth had been badly damaged at the time of the Srolta's arrival, and even if humans had comported themselves ideally since then, restoring the planet would have been taxing in the extreme.

Instead, the lead ambassador announced, the Srolta would take 600,000 human beings with them to one of their outlying colony worlds, and establish a new human civilization there. To maximize the chances of success, only the most morally and mentally developed specimens would be chosen. It would be several centuries before the Srolta would be returning to the solar system to start the originally planned Mars terraforming project. By then, all human life - and probably, most animal life - would have perished from the Earth. This was a painful outcome to the Srolta, the lead ambassador said, but at this point it was plainly inevitable. The Srolta were a pragmatic people. They would take this enormous loss to heart, but they would not pretend it had been due to any failing of their own.

Across the globe, religious jubilation erupted. Had not the Words of Scripture been made manifest? Had not a third of the planet been poisoned, a third of its twelve billion inhabitants died in the great upheavals, and a third of the orbiting satellites, manned habitats, and space-borne telescopes plunged out of orbit, falling back to the surface, their maintenance long neglected?

And had there not, as written, arrived a Redeemer? And had not the words of the Redeemer been announced to the entire world in one and the same moment? And was the old world not to pass away, as a new and unblemished world were to dawn?

And was not a select few... 600,000 out of a desperate population of eight billion... destined for salvation?

Were the Elect not on the verge of leaving this failed world for paradise in the skies above?

The Owners opened their gates and threw their finest belongings into the streets, where the common herd could fight for them. All their worldly wealth was now nothing but scrap to be tossed aside, freeing them for their ascension.

And on this night - the night of Departure - the Elect gathered in marble pavilions, exercising one final time their right to the world's last luxuries.

***

"I said I want another vanilla decoction, you stupid batch of chromosomal fuckups," screamed the woman in flowing crimson meshcloth.

"Ma'am, we don't have no more," began the beleaguered server.

"Why are you talking back?" the woman in crimson lashed out. "You fucking miscreant! You don't have the right to talk to me! You get me what I asked for, and you do it right goddamn now!"

Everyone in that corner of the great room murmured their shock at how the wretch had presumed to speak to the woman in crimson. The unhappy miscreant was on the verge of tears, still trying to explain that the supply of vanilla decoction had been exhausted. Her appalling breach of lawful conduct provoked the crowd to shouts and hisses. One man stepped out of the crowd wielding a silver-headed cane.

"Bitch!" he cried, striking the server across the face with the cane. Her tray flew to the floor, glasses spilling and bouncing across the white marble expanse. "You will answer for your violation of this lady. I will see to it that your hair is singed off your unsightly head and your scarred face will never be repaired even by the charitable clinics. You'll be sterilized, you lawbreaker! Your children will be sterilized! You've brought the full force of the law onto yourself through your infamous crime!"

The server struggled to break away from the several men who had emerged from the crowd, similarly enraged. One of them struck her again on the jaw, and then cried out and flailed his hand - he'd broken a finger on the insolent jut of her chin. "Sow!" he cried. "Assailant!" The others, seeing how he'd been injured, came to his defense, shoving the woman, trying to hurl her to the floor where she could be kicked to death.

Their drunken, furious shoving only propelled her out of their grasp, however, and she fled through the elite throng, headed toward the kitchen in back.

"We'll get her," one of the men slurred nastily, with a blood-lust grin on his face. "But let's have a look at that hand first..."

The injured man held out his hand, eyes brimming with tears. "Unbelievable," he nearly sobbed. "She'll get what's coming to her."

The other man reached out, grabbed the injured hand, and gave it a squeeze. The crying man shrieked in agony.

"That'll set the bone!" laughed the prankster.

The injured man only shrieked again, clutching his swelling, broken hand.

"Or maybe not?" the prankster added, hilariously. "I'm not a doctor!"

"Just a faith healer," someone in the watching crowd called out, sparking a wave of laughter.

"Boys, let's go get that bitch," the prankster said, the nasty edge back in his voice. A pack of drunken men pushed their way through the crowd toward the kitchen.

"Make it fast!" someone shouted. "The time is here!"

Scrap looked at his dermachron. It was true! The moment had come; it was 20:00 and several seconds.

Suddenly, Scrap felt a need to call Suzanne once more. She was all the family he had left. They had grown up on the margins of society, and she had tumbled down a low-income route of teaching while he had embraced the cutthroat world of financial services. Indeed, he had succeeded only because he'd proven willing to literally cut a few throats. But Suzanne was still his family, and even if she was not one of the Elect, he wanted to say a proper goodbye and wish her well. Maybe tell her the codes to his accounts, which he had not bothered to disburse to charity, as so many others in his circle had done.

"Connect to Suzanne," he told his PCD, watching his dermachron nervously. Would the aliens snatch him away before the call could be completed? Would an open transmit line disrupt whatever means the aliens planned to use to locate and transport him?

The contact signal buzzed and thrummed. The tiny screen pulsed with activity hues. But Suzanne's image did not appear. Was she blocking his call? She might well be angry - she had never been gracious about her place in the natural order of things. But surely she would want to speak one final time? Maybe even witness the glory of her brother's leaving?

A disruption grew from the back of the great pavilion. Men poured out of the kitchen area, screaming and shouting. Scrap turned away, trying to concentrate on his PCD, watching for his sister to answer.

Then the shouted words penetrated his consciousness:

"... gone! All of them! All the servers, gone!"

There was a chaotic muttering as people around the room turned to one another in shock and concern.

Could it be...?

"I can't raise my chauffeur!" someone cried out.

"The butler says that the governess has disappeared!" someone else bellowed.

People jostled as everyone began moving toward the exit, pulling out their PCDs as they went. Scrap remained rooted in place. Another passage from Sacred Writ had suddenly flashed into his mind:

"Blessed are the humble."

Then, still another...

"The last shall be first, and the first shall be last."

"And so we are humbled," Scrap murmured in horror. "And so we inherit the Earth..."

More words crowded into Scrap's consciousness -- not the words of Scripture now, but things Suzanne had said to him. "Your Scripture be damned," she had spat at him once, when he proselytized to her about the error of her ways. "It's fine for you to dwell at the top of the money pyramid, but who put you there? The vast number of people who do the goddamn work, that's who. You like to call yourselves 'wealth creators,' but since when have you actually dug up ore, refined metal, or put anything together in a maquiladora? What do you actually contribute?"

Another time, Suzanne, red in the face after he told her that her poverty was the direct result of her own poor choices, had gone after him with a blistering tirade. "Do you know what it actually means to make a choice that puts the others ahead of yourself? Or choosing to serve human commonality instead of your own selfish little interests? Don't tell me I'm a leech for doing the essential work of civilization. Don't deride the teachers, the charity workers, the volunteers who took up the slack of making society work when you money-grubbers snatched up every penny and then locked the treasure box. Look at yourself, you parasite. Your doctrine boils down to two words: 'It's mine!' Well, you can have it, and good luck to you!"

And then there was the time they'd really gotten down to it -- after Scrap convinced Suzanne to join him for weekly Bible study sessions. They hadn't gotten to the end of the Book of Genesis before that little arrangement fell apart.

"God told Adam and Eve not to want to know?" Suzanne had snorted. "An Omnipotent being creates human beings in His image, which must mean they have some share of his intelligence and curiosity, and then he essentially tells them to remain stupid? That's bullshit. If anything, the tree of knowledge was a test to see if his creation was worth keeping around."

"Then why did God drive them out of the Garden?" Scrap asked with his habitual silkily condescension.

"Are you kidding? The Earth is a garden. Or, it was a garden until industry gobbled up and dirtied up everything in sight. God didn't chase us out of any Garden. We had a garden, until we burned it down all around us."

Suddenly, all the certainties Scrap had lived and killed by seemed very different -- very uncertain.

"The elect," he moaned, his face ashen. "They were the humble all along. We... we elite were never the elect at all..."

"What?" An angry face suddenly thrust itself into his own, the word a shout.

Scrap looked at the other man. "We were not rejected from the Garden," he said morosely. "We rejected the Garden of our own accord. We were offered a choice of life and death, and... we chose death..."

The man struck him across the face. "Blasphemer!"

Scrap braced himself for another blow. But the tumult of the crowd swept the man away, and Scrap stepped back, pressing himself against the wall. The laughter that had filled the pavilion such a short time ago was now gone, and a low wail was beginning to gather - a wail of chagrin and despair.

The Elect had been taken. The Chosen were safe.

"Suzanne," Scrap whispered, smiling and sad.