}}}This story is told by Zang. This was a very long time ago. The exact year is lost. The location is the city of Eridu in Sumeria.}}}}}}}}}
In ancient Eridu, there was a man. This man’s name is not important, because names are not important. They are road signs in the desert, indicating nothing. Man itself is not important, and so believes that by giving itself names it can stave off—
“Jesus, fuck, Zang,” Carey snapped. “Leave off with the loony speeches, all right?”
“Yes, fine,” Zang said.
This story involves angels. This story involves Empty Ones. This is not the story of the first angel. The angels have been and will always be. This is not the story of the first Empty One. As long as humans have been, there have been Empty Ones. This is the story of how the Empty Ones learned to best serve the angels.
When society first began, the angels came. Man thought that society was a blessing, but society is an abomination. The universe is a lifeless, unthinking, beautiful machine. It is void of doubt, and fear, and hate. It simply is. The angels understand this. When man first inflicted thought upon himself, he embedded within him the most dangerous of things: a language. A language is a code. A code can be manipulated. And so the angels used mankind’s own curse to save it. They found man, and they reduced his code, until he was once again nothing. All of the energy that man had been wasting on frivolous complexity was then used to feed the angels, and to further serve the universe. This was good. This was right. But this was not enough.
The code of humanity was sloppy. Sometimes, it did not reduce cleanly, and there were remainders left over. These remainders you know as the tar men and the Empty Ones. The tar men were lucky. They are the animalistic part of man. They are not burdened with thought or desire. The Empty Ones were not lucky. They are the thinking part of man. They were cursed to know the perfection of nonexistence, while also doomed to exist forever. But the Empty Ones did not live in hate. Hate was man’s house. The Empty Ones instead dedicated themselves to helping mankind, by assisting the angels in their quest to reduce the needless complexity of life. They sought to return humanity to the universe.
So they watched. And they waited. For a very long time.
They discovered that the angels were patient creatures. They appeared rarely and seemingly at random. They blessed only a few humans a year with oblivion. This is fine for the angels. They are beyond time. This is bad for humanity, who are mired in time. Man would have to wait millennia—more, perhaps—to be fully returned to the universe. The Empty Ones could not stand to let humanity endure such torture. They sought a way to force the angels to not only appear, but to procreate. More angels would speed the job.
One day, in man’s oldest city, the Empty Ones found their way.
The Empty Ones knew they must work within the world of man to save him. So they lived in his city, and attained positions of power. They took nothing men and nothing women from the city streets, and they experimented. The people they took sometimes suffered greatly before expiring, but their pain was trivial when weighed against the pain of the species. The man in this story did not agree. One such experiment involved the man’s youngest daughter. A deformed young thing with one extra finger on her left hand. The man loved her despite this inferiority. He mistakenly believed that blood ties create a relevant bond, and lapsed into a state of insanity that caused him to act irrationally. He sought justice for his daughter.
This man had two other children. They were much older than the daughter. They were males. They were strong and willful. All three fought the Empty Ones. They struggled against the systems that the Empty Ones had put into place. They killed human soldiers employed by the Empty Ones. They kidnapped bureaucrats enforcing the will of the Empty Ones. They burned a structure used by the Empty Ones for their experiments. In this, they made a mistake.
The man was hurt badly while escaping the fire, and his sons, suffering from similar familial insanities, refused to abandon him. They helped him to flee, but he slowed them down. The chase was short lived. Their pursuers were mostly human, but among them were two Empty Ones. No matter how hard the three fought, they could not prevail. One son was wounded, badly. At last it was clear to the remaining son that he must flee. But he could not escape with both his father, and his brother. He looked to his father, who was old, and hurt. He looked to his brother, who was young, and may have healed. The son chose to save his brother and abandon his father. At that moment an angel honored them with its presence.
By virtue of the son’s actions, something within the father’s code had become ready. The angel used the complicated series of tragedies that the man called a life to create something meaningful. It created another angel.
When it was done, the Empty Ones rejoiced at the miracle. They sought to replicate these events. It took years of practice, but at last they managed. They re-created the chase, just as the father and sons had fled. They re-created the pain, the panic, and the emotional distress those original three endured. They re-created the choice they made, and the abandonment that followed—the young choosing the young over the old, as all life must do. And angels appeared.
The process was not perfect. Not just any human could serve in the roles. There were certain personality archetypes that had to be present: A personal tragedy in the distant past, which left psychic wounds that could not heal. A reactionary disdain for authority. An absence of clear want and direction. These aspects made up major chunks of the original man’s code, and so for the ritual to work, future candidates must share those attributes. As the ritual was refined, more angels were brought to Earth. More humans were solved, some of them incompletely, and so more Empty Ones were made, who, in turn, performed more rituals, to bring more angels. The ultimate solution of humanity sped ever forward, and at last its return to the universe was imminent. The cycle of creation will peak soon, and there will be nothing left but angels and Empty Ones. The Empty Ones know they cannot be solved. They are forever cursed. They realize this. Yet still, they try to save humanity from suffering existence. It is their sacrifice.