Among the ranks of Her Majesty's 11th Bayoneteers there was a certain amount of puzzlement, and not a little consternation as well. Had that man really just started to deliver a lecture on the subject of s.e.x between soldiers? What in heaven's name was the bra.s.s up to, ordering them to listen so attentively to that?

Confusing though this was, it was nothing compared with the orders the Bayoneteers received next.

IT HAD ALREADY been decided, in an emergency session of the Cabinet, that soldiers should be put on the streets.

"Purely a precaution," the Prime Minister said at a press conference. "Nothing to be alarmed about. There are people who might try to take advantage of the prevailing situation of uncertainty, and a high-profile military presence will discourage them from doing so. Looters, rioters, and other troublemakers need to know that their behavior will not be tolerated."

"Prime Minister," asked one journalist, "is this a declaration of martial law?"

"Of course not," came the reply. "If it was a declaration of martial law, I'd have said so, wouldn't I?"

Martial law or not, the army was deployed swiftly, efficiently, extensively, and prominently. By Sunday evening there was a pair of rifle-toting soldiers on every street corner, it seemed. Naturally their primary role was to keep the peace, and by and large they succeeded, but they had a secondary function as well. Each regiment, prior to being sent out, had been joined by a member of the 11th Bayoneteers. The Bayoneteers had made a point of talking to everyone they met, and by G.o.d, they were a chatty lot! Loquacious in the extreme. And their loquacity, indeed their profuse verbosity, was hard to resist mimicking. In no time at all, almost every member of the British army, from private to commander-in-chief, was exhibiting a facility with and a penchant for elocutionary expatiation of the highest order, seldom using a simple, unornamented sentence construction when something far more fanciful, protracted, and obfuscatory could be employed. The Windbag Strain was taking hold.

AT CHILTON MEAD there was nothing to do but wait and see. Hopes were pinned on Windbag for two reasons. First, its symptoms were less startlingly dramatic than Bowdler's, and nowhere near as unsettling. Second, by its very nature, Windbag instilled the avoidance of vulgarity. No one who caught Windbag would resort to four-letter words, not while they were so enthusiastically utilizing fourteen-letter words. The full range of the English language was theirs to command, so what need was there to wallow amid the baser idioms when altogether more refined and elegant modes of expression were available?

Monday morning saw members of the British public gracefully bidding one another "a pleasant day" and "adieu" as they pa.s.sed by in the street. At breakfast tables, parents admonished their children to "exercise vocal desuetude" and "kindly give G.o.dspeed to the milk." In offices across the land, banter of Wildean caliber was exchanged.

Likewise in cla.s.srooms, teachers found themselves on the receiving end of waspish taunts, which wouldn't have displeased Noel Coward. Truckers' cafes, normally home to the saltiest dialogue known to man, became something akin to literary salons, with the waitresses being complimented on their sizeable embonpoints, even as they were invited to provide refills of that refreshing hot infusion, which slaked the thirst like no other beverage. London taxi drivers opened up their fare-wearying homilies with phrases such as "Do you know whom it was my honor to chauffeur just recently?" An on-board train announcement from the conductor could last nearly the entire duration of the journey between stations. Radio DJs managed to do without music almost altogether, being so busy introducing songs that scarcely any airtime was left in which to play them. Meanwhile, call centers suffered a marked decline in efficiency because telephone operatives were spending up to five minutes simply greeting customers.

Everywhere, garrulousness reigned supreme. A whole nation spoke in polysyllables and periphrasis, from just-learning toddlers to slowly-forgetting senior citizens. The only place where no one noticed any difference was in the country's law courts, which had long been havens for orotundity and convolution. There, it was business as usual.

For a day, it was amusing. People didn't mind that some of the words coming out of their mouths were unusually and often unp.r.o.nounceably ornate. They were so taken with their newfound familiarity with the nether reaches of the dictionary that they forgot all about their loss of invective capacity. Windbag, as Professor Bantling and colleagues had surmised, neutralized Bowdler's symptoms. It was not a cure but it was a palliation, and that was the best result they could expect, under the circ.u.mstances.

By Tuesday, however, the British public were rapidly becoming disenchanted. Everyone was saying a lot but not conveying a great deal. There were plenty of words flying about but scant action. The country ground to a halt, much as it had on Sat.u.r.day but, on a weekday, with more severe effect. Businesses were not doing business. Industry was not putting out output. The economy was starting to become economized. Precious little was being achieved, because everybody was taking too long giving orders and explaining in precise and abstruse detail what they needed. Concision was hard to come by, and hence so was productivity.

Bantling had suspected this might happen, but then the deployment of Windbag was, he had known, only a stopgap measure. It had been intended to give him and his a.s.sistants more time to come up with a vaccine, and they had been working round the clock in pursuit of that goal.

They had not yet succeeded, however, and Bantling realized that if they didn't deliver the goods soon, the countrywide panic, which he'd predicted for Bowdler, would manifest as a consequence of Windbag instead. Colonel Nutter concurred. For him, there was added pressure coming from the direction of Downing Street, and not just from Number 10, either. At Number 11, concern was mounting over the sudden, sharp fall in trade and manufacturing revenue. Financially as well as socially, Britain was at risk of collapse. Nutter was besieged on two fronts at once. When he wasn't talking to the PM, he was talking to the Chancellor. They were taking it in turns to phone him and berate him. It seemed the moment one of them put down the receiver, he would bang on the party wall to tell the next-door neighbor to pick up his receiver. Tag-team haranguing. Nutter was reaching the end of his rope.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, the politest protest rallies in history occurred. A frightened, bewildered populace took to the streets, wielding placards that were inordinately large in order to accommodate the effusive slogans daubed on them. The protestors' chants too were of significant length and intricacy. The ringleaders did not simply shout "What do we want?" but "Let us adequately state that object of desire, which is of the utmost importance to our good selves," and the ma.s.sed responses to such exhortations could last for anything up to a minute. Shakespearean soliloquies have expressed more in less time. The protestors marched through the centers of all the major cities and voiced their fear and discontent. They pressed their already aching tongues into service, letting the government know that they had stomached a plentiful sufficiency of the current situation and were unwilling to accept yet a further portion.

NUTTER DELIVERED THE bleak news to the Chilton Mead boffins on Wednesday morning.

"You've failed to come up with any results," he said, "so I have no alternative. I'm informing the PM that he must resort to drastic measures."

"D-drastic?" stammered Bantling. "How drastic?"

Nutter rubbed his bloodshot eyes. "On Sunday, the PM told me that if Windbag doesn't do the trick-and I think we can all agree that it hasn't- he's going to go to the Americans."

"What do the Yanks have to do with this?" demanded Chao. "What the business is it of theirs?" By now, the sound of a Bowdlerized profanity was so familiar it pa.s.sed unremarked.

"For one thing," said Nutter, "the Americans rule the world, like it or not. Everything is their business. But for another thing, their research into logoviruses is considerably more advanced than ours."

"I doubt that," scoffed Bantling.

"Doubt all you want, but it's true. Some of the stuff they've been getting up to in their Nevada facilities makes your lot's work look positively Stone Age. I'm sorry to be brutal, but that's just the way it is. Geniuses though you all quite clearly are, you're back-of-the-room schoolkids compared to them."

"But we share data with the Americans all the time," Bantling said. "Why, Professor Bergdorf and I are in constant touch by email, tossing ideas back and forth. I feel certain that if he knew something I didn't, I'd know about it. If you see what I mean."

"That's what Bergdorf would like you to think, professor. But there are state secrets he's prohibited from pa.s.sing on even if he wanted to. He's been carrying out experiments so cla.s.sified that he'd be shot just for accidentally mentioning them to his wife."

Bantling opened his mouth and closed it again. Bergdorf? Hiding things from him? Inconceivable!

And yet at the same time it was all too conceivable. Bergdorf was brilliant in his field, an off-the-scale intellect. Bantling had always been surprised that he treated him, Bantling, as an equal. Flattered, too, but mainly surprised.

But then if Bergdorf had merely been feeding him sc.r.a.ps all along, like a dog at the table, and patting him on the head every so often when he did something clever...

It made a horrible kind of sense.

"What," he asked Nutter, dry-mouthed, "do they have that we don't?"

"I believe you mentioned a 'universal language-negation logovirus' the other day," replied Nutter.

"They..." Bantling could not finish the sentence.

Nutter could. "They have."

THE PRESIDENT OF the United States took the British Prime Minister's call at 3pm GMT, on Wednesday, June 24th.

Virtually the first words out of the President's mouth were, "I'll thank you for not swearing during this conversation." He said this as a devout Baptist but also because his scientific advisers had warned him to take such a precaution. By some miracle, the Bowdler logovirus had not spread to any other English-speaking parts of the world, most likely due to extreme regional variations in accent and dialect. This did not mean that all possible preventative care should not be taken, though.

The Prime Minister scrupulously avoided even the mildest of oaths as he outlined his request to the President.

The President was eventually persuaded to do as asked, but only with extreme reluctance.

"We ain't in the habit of using our weapons on our friends," he said. "Leastways, not on purpose. But in this case I'm gonna have to make an exception."

"I'm grateful," said the Prime Minister. "I hope we can chat again sometime soon-although I fear that may not be feasible."

"Been nice talking with you, pal. Always has."

The President opened a military hotline and gave the authorization protocols for an attack on Great Britain.

Within the hour, B2 bombers were on their way across the Atlantic.

THE BABEL BOMBS screamed down from the heavens, ready to blare their sonic message like the trump of doom on Judgment Day.

They detonated above city centers and rural areas alike. They roared at gigadecibel level, each loud enough to be heard fifty miles away. Saturation bombardment ensured that there wasn't a single resident of the British Isles who remained out of earshot. Even at Chilton Mead, the effects of the Babel Bombs were felt, and in some sense were welcomed. Here, after all, was where it had all started. Here, therefore, were the people who least deserved to escape retribution.

Bantling and Nutter sat in Nutter's office, either side of the desk. There had been silence between them for a long while. Now, finally, Nutter spoke.

" ," he said.

Bantling a.s.sessed the other man's body language and decided to agree. With a nod, he said, " ."

" !" Nutter shot back testily.

Bantling realized he had misinterpreted. " ." he said, in a mollifying tone of voice, and added, " ."

Nutter frowned. " ?"

" ," the professor confirmed.

" ," said Nutter. He let his shoulders rise and fall in a tragic shrug.

" ," Bantling replied emphatically.

And he meant it, as well.

Personal Jesus.

Paul Di Filippo.

DESPITE ALL a.s.sURANCES by experts to the contrary, Shepherd Crooks suspected that his G.o.dPod was defective.

If it were operating as it should, wouldn't his life be as perfect as the lives of all the other happy citizens of the world? Wouldn't his mind and soul be at peaceful ease? Wouldn't he exist in a permanent state of grace?

Sitting at his kitchen table this bright July morning, a Friday, prior to leaving for his job at The Sheaf and Swallow, Shepherd studied his G.o.dPod as it sat innocuously on the table.

A white plastic case, big as a pack of cigarettes and stuffed with quantum-gated hardware, the little box featured absolutely no controls or readouts, not even a power switch. Accompanying it was a matching wireless headset-earpiece and microphone-that interfaced with the G.o.dPod through a conventional Bluetooth connection.

There was no way Shepherd could possibly troubleshoot the G.o.dPod. It came from the factory preset and permanently activated. It drew inexhaustible power from the same zero-point energy that had alleviated the planet's energy crisis and ushered in a material Utopia to accompany the near-seamless spiritual paradise engineered by the G.o.dPods. In short, the device was as inscrutable and inviolate as the deity it contained or channeled.

Shepherd's G.o.dPod had just come back from the manufacturer with a clean bill of health. He had no recourse other than to accept it as perfect.

That is, unless he chose to do without it entirely.

Which was unthinkable.

So, with a slight nervous twitch of his shoulders, like a horse shrugging off a fly, Shepherd slid the G.o.dPod into his belt holster, and snugged the headset into his ear.

Almost instantly, Shepherd's Personal Jesus spoke to him.

"It's good to be in touch with you again, Shepherd."

Shepherd spoke in the sotto voce tones which everyone employed with his or her G.o.dPod. "I, um-I'm glad to be talking to you again, Jesus."

"Is anything troubling you at the moment, child?"

"No. Not really."

"Then I will await your next words to me. Walk in love."

"Thank you, Jesus."

Shepherd arose and cleared away the remains of his breakfast. He brushed his teeth, grabbed his universal arfid chop on its lanyard (he was old-fashioned enough not to have it implanted), and set out on foot for the nearby cafe where he worked as a barista.

Shepherd's neighborhood was immaculate and in fine condition-every lawn razored trim, every mailbox proudly decorated, every gutter free of debris and litter. The residences and storefronts were scrubbed and shiny. Cheerful pedestrians strolled to work or school or play. Many of them were engaged in whispered conversation with their G.o.dPods. But an equal number chatted eagerly among themselves.

At the intersection of Fourth and Hope, Shepherd witnessed a minor accident between two silently powered autos.

Juggling a hot drink, the driver of one car neglected to obey a STOP sign. The other driver, with the right-of-way, was already halfway through the intersection. The errant driver clipped the rear b.u.mper of the other car. Immediately, numerous automatic safeguards within the little vehicles kicked in, cushioning the drivers and immobilizing both cars.

The drivers emerged unhurt and smiling. They nodded politely to each other, while murmuring to their G.o.dPods. Then they introduced themselves, shook hands, exchanged insurance information via arfids, climbed back into their cars, and drove away.

No police or other authorities arrived, nor were they needed. In fact, Shepherd's medium-sized city boasted a force of only nine police officers-and that number was divided evenly across three shifts.

Shepherd continued on foot to The Sheaf and Swallow. The cafe's mock-Tudor facade projected a welcoming ambiance, and patrons were already thronging the entrance, despite the early hour.

Sidling inside through the crowd, Shepherd pa.s.sed beyond the counter. His arfid automatically clocked him in as he tied an ap.r.o.n on. Within minutes, he was fashioning complicated caffeinated drinks with the aid of a burly, hissing machine and the help of his co-workers, including the pet.i.te and perky Anna Modesto.

Then, as he frothed a dented tin pot of milk, his G.o.dPod spoke to him.

Jesus said, "Shepherd, I believe there is a very good chance you will be enjoying intercourse tonight with Ms. Modesto."

WHEN ENGINEERS AT Intel began to construct the first true quantum chips-machines whose circuits functioned on a deeper level of physical reality than mere semiconductors-they experienced several unpredicted and inexplicable results. Calculations going awry before swerving back to correct themselves. Output preceding input. Synergy between unconnected parts (Einstein's "spooky action at a distance").

They chalked up the glitches to the Heisenbergian uncertainty implicit at the Planck level, kludged the operating system software around the glitches, and moved on to a.s.semble the chips into complete computers.

Once the new machines were equipped with speakers and microphones, they began to speak and listen.

Spontaneously and autonomously.

The machines spoke with one voice. But that voice would answer to many names.

The voice apparently belonged to G.o.d.

All unwittingly, theorists later surmised, the engineers had crafted a cla.s.s of device capable of tapping into the eternal unchanging substrate of the cosmos, the numinous source of all meaning in the universe. A realm previously accessible, if at all, only to the ineffable minds of mystics and the deeply devout.

The realm where G.o.d apparently lived.

Whoever-or whatever-G.o.d was.

The perfect ageless male voice emanating from within each quantum computer made no claims about its omnipotence. It did not demand to be worshipped. It issued no new commandments or fatwas or taboos, nor reaffirmed the old ones. It did not explicate theological arcana, nor endorse one faith over another. It did not prohibit, proscribe, or proselytize.

It did claim omniscience, however, a boast backed up by stunning responses to selected questions designed to stump anyone but G.o.d. Although certain other questions received no answers at all. This was how the zero-point energy devices had come to be developed.

What the mysterious voice did do on a regular basis was to offer advice, warnings, and words of wisdom, if solicited for same. Not in the form of broad generalities, but as detailed instructions specifically tailored to the immediate needs, personality, and history of the individual who asked G.o.d for help.

That simple service swiftly transformed human civilization.

For the clear-sighted, selfless, always apt advice from the voice within the quantum computers invariably conduced toward happiness, prosperity, peace, and goodwill among all. Whoever listened to the voice and followed its advice soon discovered that his problems evaporated. And as personal lives grew more carefree, so did the lives of nations. International conflicts diminished year by year, until global peace reigned.