The White Wraith

Excerpt from a Church of the Omega pamphlet:

The wired world has only sought to entangle the human mind—to enervate it, while sowing the seeds of confusion, doubt, and depravity. Man has constructed the machine, but the machine has deconstructed man. Technology has stifled our potential—human achievement is now secondary to the perceived miracles of an electric construct that enslaves us.

Behold, they said—a digital world! Nay, I proclaim—a doomed world! They promised wonders unimaginable, knowledge infinitum, the gateway to a life of liberation. And we believed it. We believed them when they told us the mechanism supersedes the man—and, in turn, we became cogs in the machine.

Then we allowed them to substitute all that is veridical for the virtual, to distract us with illusions and lies. Our faculties dulled—the drooling masses no longer fit to think for themselves, only content to stare into the lulling glow of infernal devices. The Net, a window to this vast domain of the unreal, where untold wisdom is at one’s fingertips—or so they would have you think. Instead, a limitless realm of fallacies, where truth is deceit, idiocy is rewarded, and humanity can collectively watch as it hastens towards its own decline. Even the name is telling—“the Net”—a binding trap, devised to constrict and ensnare those caught within.

And, if all that were not enough, we come to the ultimate sacrilege! After we so completely believe their words of this shining mechanized future, and after we accept their wondrous digital dreams, then we willingly let them defile our bodies with chips—so that we will forever be one with the machine. Yet some crave even more—the wayward souls whose minds are no longer their own, who wish to enmesh themselves further—to become living machines—trade limbs and flesh for inhuman appendages made of circuits and wires.

This is their future, but it need not be ours. Together, we can stop this nightmare. The God Machine is powerful, but even it is not omnipotent. Those who worship the wire must be made to see the truth—the world can still be saved. We can bring it to zero and reset. The Machine believes that it is the Alpha, but united we are the Omega, and we will bring an end to its terror.

The White Wraith. Story by Midnight. Art by Leonel Walbr.