The angel opened the Seventh Vial, unleashing a Great Pestilence upon the face of the earth, and the people were much afflicted.
~ John the Divine
Those were days of woe. The sky darkened to a foreboding gray sheet of low cloud which would give neither rain nor snow. The sun had not come out for months and the villagers grew weary and despondent. After many years of prosperity, evil came upon the face of the land. The crop failed, and their meager stores of grain dwindled. Hunger was everywhere, and fervent prayer yielded only more suffering.
By night, red Mars chided from beside Orion; the soothsayers wore faces drawn long with foreboding. Winds that chilled to the bone came up hard, stinging the eyes and ripping the flesh with tumbleweed, sand and gravel. The dogs couldn't be quieted and their howling set the wolves to commotion; children cried and would not be comforted. Scholars of the Copernican science had predicted an eclipse, and some feared that the unusual celestial alignment would mark out the beginning of yet more evils. Others foresaw a new beginning, and the town divided into two camps: the camp of hope, and the camp of fear.
When the appointed time came, the moon cast its shadow upon the sun and all became as night in the middle of day. Soon the sun was entirely blotted out, and crowds lined the streets watching the heavenly spectacle. A gasp went up as all could see the silhouette of a hooded horseman riding up onto the grey ledges which overlooked the village. The rider wore heavy gauntlets, filthy boots, and a black helmet which obscured the face. The steed’s hooves kicked up a cloud of brown dust and ice along the edge of the cliffs.
The sight of this strange intruder sent a wave of dread through the onlookers, even those who had hoped that the astrological alignment would offer reprieve from their troubles. The rider moved swiftly as the darkness increased. When the sun was completely blotted out, the intruder pulled a vial from a leather saddle bag.
Accounts vary as to what happened next. All agree that the rider was careful to hold the vessel at arms length and downwind. Some contend that the container was carefully opened and its contents ejected into the wind. Others say that it was simply smashed on the rocks. All agree that the rider took pains to avoid any contact with the sinister content, a noxious powder, as it scattered to the far winds.
No one doubts that within the vial was that odious potion which unleashed the tribulations which were soon to afflict all of humanity with grief such as none had ever endured before.
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I Vector
A line of helmeted protesters formed a line of shields made from wood and random objects. There were actually two lines: one standing, and one kneeling in front of them. Together, they formed a solid wall.
The police formed another line facing the protesters. It was shortly before dusk and both groups were getting edgy. A police officer stared at the protesters and pawed the ground like a horse.
Police in Russia are called militsiya, Милиция, which means “militia”. They tried to change that to Полиция (“police”) in 2011 but no one buys it. They are still called militsiya by just about every Russian.
It was shortly before dusk, and both sides wanted some kind of conclusion while there was still some light. Speaking through a PA system, one of the police officers issued a dispersal order. No one dispersed. A chant went up from the crowd.
“Нет вируса! Нет карантина! ! No Virus! No Lockdowns! No Oligarchs! No Militsiya!”
Without warning, the police started firing rubber bullets, but they ricocheted off of the protesters’ protective gear. Then came the tear gas. Most of the protesters pulled out face masks – they were not in short supply, as the Russian Ministry of Health distributed them free. That was one benefit of the multiple pandemics which Russians had endured in recent years. Protesters wearing welding gloves lobbed the tear gas canisters back at the police. Not all the cops had protective masks; their ranks thinned noticeably as well-equipped protesters strutted about despite clouds of CS hanging in the air.
The remaining police contingents started firing rubber-coated steel bullets into the crowd. They slammed against the protesters’ shields creating a bizarre staccato thud! thud! thud!
A bullet slipped between shields and hit a protester in the eye socket. Blood streamed out onto the sidewalk. There were screams. None of the protesters left.
Then a Molotov cocktail arced through the air, seemed to stall at the apex of its path, and fell directly on the police. The flaming gasoline was mixed with some kind of thickener and it became napalm, clinging to their shields and helmets. The cops panicked, scattering in every direction as more fiery bottles rained down on them.
Daniila Ivanova Nikolaev had a bullhorn and was inviting the police to mutiny.
“Throw down your arms! Stop doing the dirty work of the oligarchs! Join us!”
The government had stationed a sniper on the roof of a nearby bank building. Daniila Nikolaev was in the cross hairs of a DXL-5, known as the Maserati of rifles. It was built to take out Chechen armored trucks and cost more than the annual pay of a staff sergeant in the Russian army. The price of each round was equal to a week’s pay. This was nothing compared to the price paid by those on the receiving end of its lethal devices.
A senior commander, Major Pavel Ivanov, stood behind the sniper, Warrant Officer Ludmila Andreev. He pulled the soggy stub of a cigar from his mouth.
“Shoot that loudmouth, what are you waiting for.”
The sniper frowned. Who the fuck does he think he’s talking to?
“Shoot her!”
Maybe I should join them. Maybe I should shoot Ivanov.
Down on the ground, a group of soccer hoodlums joined the police and moved toward the main line of protesters.
Gunshots rang out from the main bloc of protesters. The soccer hoodlums retreated, running down the side alleys in complete disarray. There were more shots.
Then the police opened fire on the crowd. These were real bullets. Shouts went out as one protester after another screamed in pain and collapsed.
Nikolaev’s son, Anton Nikolaev, was present, and he had a Makarov pistol. He intended to fire over the head of the police, which he did, but what he did not expect was that there were police up on the rooftops. He emptied the magazine in the direction of the bank building.
The last bullet in his clip went straight through Ivanov’s forehead. Warrant Officer Andreev saw him keel over. She could hardly believe what was happening.
Oh fuck! They are going to say I fragged him.
She gazed at the melee below and gauged her options. She had a long history of insubordination write-ups. Pavlov’s death was not going to go over well with her preceptors, even if they didn’t think she shot him. Wasn’t she supposed to protect him?
Best to run for it. The resistance will hide me.
Someone else in the crowd had a gun and the Molotovs continued to fly into the police ranks. It was too much for them. The remaining police split up and ran for it despite the commanders shouting order not to retreat. The crowd surrounded the few remaining policemen.
Anton Nikolaev, was still holding his gun, which didn’t have any bullets left. He waved it at the police officers; he was bluffing.
“We won’t hurt you. You can join us or you can leave. We won’t harm you.”
The rank-and-file police officers looked at one another and nodded their heads affirmatively. A few of the older ones with bars on their sleeves looked angry and scared shitless. Those were the ones that started backing away.
“Go on. Run. Get out of here. You have five seconds or I’ll shoot...one…”
The commanders ran for their lives in their black business shoes which were so heavy with authority as to be virtually useless for running. The officers who chose not to run looked at Nikolaev with quizzical expressions.
“The rest of you, welcome to our movement. We will put the oligarchs once and for all and with your help build a new Russia.”
Danielle Ivanova started to hug the policemen one by one. Some of the protesters hung back, eyeing the whole matter suspiciously, but no one interfered. As the hug fest proceeded, a woman dressed in an army uniform ran toward the crowd. It was Warrant Officer Andreev.
“I wish to join you. Here is my gun. You may have it. I don’t want it anymore.”
She laid her sniper rifle down before the Nikolaevs.
“We don’t want it either. But we understand the necessity of armed struggle. None of us have any idea how to operate that thing. You keep it.”
Andreev raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. That looks like some kind of expert gear. It must have taken you a lot of time to learn how to shoot that thing. We wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
Ludmila Andreev was fed up with the shooting of civilians, fellow Russians, as was almost the entire Russian army. It was only a matter of time before the oligarchs fell and a new Russia would be born. Everyone knew this from the lowliest private to the brigadier generals in the Kremlin.
There was only one major obstacle: the virus. A new virus had swept the globe and it was hitting Russia especially hard. The government imposed lock-downs at the drop of a pin, modeled on the Chinese “zero-COVID” policies from the early 2020’s. These were often correlated to genuine outbreaks in which thousands of people fell ill and died. However, most people suspected that the Kremlin was deliberately spreading the virus in places where there was resistance to the regime.
There was a lot of overlap between hospitalizations spiking and outbreaks of resistance. The old guard, those still loyal to the state, had their explanation: the ‘radicals’ were concentrated in the cities, and that was where the virus could spread easily. That didn’t explain how it was that small towns like …. and … which had protests experienced disease outbreaks immediately thereafter. Samizdat bulletins circulated on the underground internet which mapped this with great precision. There was almost an exact match, and the hospitalizations corresponded almost to the day with the incubation period of the virus.
Danielle Nikolaev found an article attributed to a CIA-linked foreign affairs journal which alleged that the police were spreading the virus at the demonstrations themselves. She posted the article on Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, under an assumed name. It was rapidly deleted by the censors, but not before hundreds and then thousands of people reposted it.
The theory took hold and spread like wildfire. The protest in Palace Square was triggered when evidence emerged that this was indeed occurring. Activists caught some infiltrators posing as allies; they were engaged in some highly suspicious activity. They first attracted attention when they were wearing hazmat suits underneath street clothes at demonstrations. They wore conspicuous P-100 respirators, the kind worn when painting or using hazardous chemicals.
Once they attracted attention with this odd attire, they were closely observed by the protesters. Then they were spreading a dry aerosol into the air just upwind of a demonstration in Moscow.
Photographs were taken, and posted on the clandestine Runet web; the culprits were found after a massive collective doxing operation. Facial recognition software had been utilized by the government to track down dissidents, but activists had managed to boomerang this technology and use it to identify government agents. It turned out to be quite useful: the impostors were traced to Novosibirsk.
Novosibirsk is famously the location of the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, also known as Vector. Underground researchers matched cars entering the Vector facility with cars parked in the infiltrators’ driveways. Nobody doubted that they were agents of the Russian state bio-weapons unit and this disclosure made headlines on every news outlet except for Russia Today and its clones. Even the Chinese government news agency mentioned the scandal, perhaps to shift some of its shame from the zero-COVID policies which caused it so much embarrassment in the early twenties.
The protesters in Palace Square posted video of their victory and it turned out that there had been similar police surrenders and retreats in all the major cities. In Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, protesters set up tent cities in a twenty-four hour occupation, and a half-hearted police attempt to disperse them was an abject failure. In Yekaterinburg's Theater Square, the chief of police was videotaped arm-in-arm with the leaders of the protests.
The one exception was Novosibirsk is "Krasny Square”. The protests there were outnumbered by counter-protesters who claimed that the whole affair was manufactured by the Central Intelligence Agency, NATO and the Ukrainian Armed Forces. A speech was given by Kremlin spokesman Sergey Petrushechka, rumored to be in line for succession when the aging President stepped down.
“All of this is the work of nefarious foreign intelligence agencies. They have provoked riots with a piece of pure fiction pushed by CIA operatives and their proxies in NATO. Our diligent FSB agents have traced the author of this fiction to a known CIA puppet, the so-called wunderkind of biology, the female Einstein who in reality is no more than a lapdog for her imperialist handlers.”
On a large screen behind him was a picture of a woman. Two pictures, to be exact. On the left was her profile from Foreign Issues, a journal which the Russian government long held to be an instrument of the CIA. On the right was a visitor clearance pass with the same woman’s picture on it. The pass was for Fort Detrick in Maryland – the center of US bio-weapons research. Her name and affiliation were clear: Joanna Smythe, Ph. D., CIA, Langley, Virginia.
“This is the face of the hoax.” Petrushechka glanced at the screen. “Not unattractive, to those unaware of the evil that lies behind that mask. And isn’t always the case that Western imperialism puts a pretty face on its fascism and colonialism? “
He slammed his hand down on the podium.
“This woman is the temptress handpicked to deliver the forbidden knowledge, the fruit which you are not to indulge.”
His face was scarlet with rage. His aides looked at each other quizzically, as if to say “WTF?” No one knew quite what he meant – if this supposed operative was delivering forbidden knowledge, that begs the question: is what she wrote true?
These nuances were lost on the Novosibirsk crowds. They lived in a town which derived much of its’ economic status from the presence of Vector. In their eyes, no Westerner, certainly no one from the USA had any right to knowledge of bio-weapons. Those were state secrets, state secrets that kept their local economy prosperous. Petrushchka could have recited the alphabet from behind the podium and the crowd would have cheered him.
“This woman is the lead researcher in CIA-NATO biolabs. We believe it is she who has engineered this virus which is afflicting our people. It is she who has pioneered gain-of-function research – research which gives added capability to viruses and bacteria. Research that is engineered to kill Russians. Viruses which target DNA sequences prominent among Russian Slavs. This woman is an architect of genocide!”
As if on cue, someone started chanting “Zatkni yei Shut Her Up” and he repeated the chant from the podium. It took hold, and soon eight thousand people were raising their fists at the woman pictured on the screen and chanting.
Next — Chapter Two
This is Chapter One of Anthropocene Memoir: Ghost of the Forgotten Snows, an installment novel by Geof Bard. Earlier versions of chapters 1-3 first published in rough version on Medium.
This is Chapter One of Anthropocene Memoir: Ghosts of the Forgotten Snows, an installment novel by Geof Bard.
Read the Prologue originally written as Chapter One here at Neocities; earlier versions of chapters 1-3 first published on Medium.