"Good evening, you are listening to Last Hour. We are counting down to Bleak Zero. I will be your host; I will be the voice of reason and compassion. My words will be your anchor. In these last days, in this last hour, I will give you hope. I will give you reason. I will give you a chance. Listen closely, my dear children, for your lives are very brief.

"We are all participants in a global experiment, a world-wide trial where there is no control group. This is the secret of our leadership. You can comb the empty spaces in their expedient rhetoric, data mine their whispered phone conversations, and even eavesdrop on their midnight moaning as they climax all over the scarred bellies of their whores, but you won't find any admission of their secret agenda. They are too clever for that, too bound by their own pacts and betrayals to admit the truth of what they have done.

"The blood has dried at the bottom of the page where all thirteen signatures are in place. The stars are aligned, the order is kept, and the wheel has been set in motion. All that is left is your participation. Your. Sacrifice. Is. Required.

"It will happen. In fifty minutes. This is the Last Hour. Time enough for understanding. Time enough for one last kiss, one last instant of free will. Yes, put your ear close to the speaker. Feel it vibrate against your lobe. The buzz of my lips, the hush of my inhalation. Feel my touch. This will be our first and last clandestine rendezvous, our single illicit meeting where my lips and your ear will have contact. Yes, full contact. No protection, no illusions, no turning away at the last second (yes, you must not flinch when the time comes). This will take but a few moments. It won't hurt (rather, not as much as you might think). You will like it. You will want to do it again.

"That rush you are feeling? That is exactly what they want you to feel. They want you to succumb to the fetid heat of your blood, to the animal desire of your cocks and cunts. They want you to offer your ears, your mouths, your dirty secret holes, for them to fuck. Put it in, you moan, yes, put it in now. I want it. I want it so badly.

"Forty minutes now. Do you understand how you have been manipulated? How you have been cheated? I offer you a chance for free will, for the unrestrained determination of your own soul, and you still leap to follow my lead. I tell you to offer yourself and you do, without thought and without any awareness of the confusion in my speech. Bleak Zero will take your minds, and most of you won't even miss them.

"You want to feel something? Yes, that is good. A reaction is still action, though it is no act of creation. We have forgotten what it was like to participate in genesis. Those memories, like the Forms of ancient philosophy, are just abstractions now. All that we have left is shadows of shadows. We react because it is the best echo we have of creation. It is the only echo.

"They will take that away from you as well. You won't feel the loss as it happens because it is an organic polymer just a few carbon and oxygen atoms away from the starch in your bread and cereal. You won't know that it is in your blood because your blood will accept it like an old friend. You won't know that it has attached itself to your neural pathways because they will just vanish from your circuitry. You won't know.

"Thirty minutes now. They've already put it in the water. It's being vented into the streets as I speak, rising up through the storm grates and manhole covers. Everything will just seem a little heavier, a little wetter, a little more like Christmas and a little less like New Year's.

"Put your ear next to the speaker. I want to slip my tongue in your ear. I want to touch your brain, just once before it loses its tension and flexibility. Yes, just once. Listen to me. You will forget what it is to love and be loved; you will forget how the world warps when you climax. You will forget how to taste the sweat of another and find all of your hopes and fears and dreams mirrored in their water. You will forget how we are one that has been split into two.

"You will forget. When the Bleak Zero comes.

"Weep with me. For it is all that we can do together now. The Last Hour is upon us, and it is waning now. Shhh. I know. There is so much left undone, left unsaid, left unfinished. There will always been acts left unrealized. This the echo left to us, the children who have forgotten Creation. That sensation of incompleteness? Yes, that will always be with us.

"Until the Bleak Zero. Until your sacrifice is upon you. That is what they seek to drown, what they seek to kill. That memory of the echo of the shadow. When thrice-removed God is gone, what will be left?

"Yes, I will miss you too. Touch the speaker. Press yourself against it. I am just on the other side. So very close. In these last twenty minutes, we are together, you and I. We are thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same thrill and despair in our hearts. Yes, I believe in your divinity, and I want you to show it to me. Yes, show me. Let me see your Godhead. Make it one last time.

"I know you can. I know you remember.

"I am so close. You can find me."

"There are doors everywhere. I am behind all of them."