Corie smiled. "Ambiguity. Good. That means the deepest part of you is seriously entertaining my challenge."
"I meant your rant. And you still haven't told me what any of this has to do with the new Church. If, in fact, that's what my meeting is really about."
"Oh, it is. I'm certain of that. They're about to take a page out of Senator Joe McCarthy's playbook. Party membership is about to require Church membership. They laid the groundwork for the change with something so simple, so innocuous, that those who didn't accept it without a second thought were ridiculed for being insufficiently patriotic. The word they used was "traitor', and all over the simple matter of wearing a red, white and blue lapel pin. Yet even that was planned out in advance, using veterans' organizations to get people used to the idea of equating that symbolic gesture with something as basic as honoring your country.
"The job they will ask you to do is simple. Craft a campaign to turn that patriotic fervor into a religious one. Get the cowed masses to report regularly to their newly built sanctuaries. You might know them by the cover story you've been fed, as Federal Detention Centers, the fortresses built and staffed to enormous profit by the same corporations that have benefited so well from the so-called War on Terror. Anyone who resists and there will be plenty --- will be branded as the newest kind of infidel, fated to be tortured, murdered, and used to threaten whoever's left standing. They've lusted after Armageddon. Now they're making their own. And you're the lucky man to make it all possible."
He stood very still.
"For you," she said finally, "it could be just another day's work. You could take your pay, and play at being their pet monkey. Or... you could use your skill to poison their plans, to make it seem like their plan is working, while hiding the seeds of their destruction with the words that make them happy. As Bulwer-Lytton wrote in his play about Cardinal Richelieu, 'the pen is mightier than the sword'. Only this time, that pen is in your hand's, not Thomas Jefferson's."
Corie was weak, drained. Her breath came in broken gasps, and she nervously avoided even looking at Jurdens.
Then, wordlessly, he turned and left.
THE END
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