Book of the Dead

“Heart shaped silver locket story” for Vocal+

Reading from ‘The Book of the Dead’ of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, Justice read “…who may be Ani’s son or an assistant priest who bore the title SA-MER-F, i.e. “his loving son.” This last-named holds a remarkable instrument called “U r heka”, a name which means “great one of spells,” or “great one of words of power”.

Justice looked up from the Book of the Dead at the same time Peace looked back at Justice.

In the meeting of their gaze, the world stood still. For a fraction of a second time didn’t exist then it clocked again as they took another breath in.

Peace was lost in time and space, spending most hours of the day staring at their own hand. Traumatised by years of survival. The second hand on Peace’s watch had stopped at the precise time the global economy collapsed. It ticked forward just once when Peace looked up to see the most beautiful and intense woman they had ever seen walking over to them. Justice said “Hey” and they began to talk as if it was completely to be expected they would find themselves here, under such conditions amid more coincidence than a human could believe. Months had passed since Peace had seen another person and it had been several years longer for Justice.

Holding her face between their hands, Peace said with more love than Justice was prepared to receive, “I see you and I love you.”

The three words brought Justice a new heart full of hope. Justice would never stop fighting for peace and she knew it. In order to take on the world, they learned they needed each other so as to maintain their sanity. They needed to tell stories from their childhood so as to not become depraved.

In a ravaged landscape full of particles of plutonium (Radon-222) all human beings aged drastically and died within a few years. No-one had anything to eat or a way of escaping the atmosphere. A century before world trading centres were hacked by Chinese robots programmed by Russians then all hell broke loose across the ‘human’ world.

Centuries earlier, efforts to sustain a nuclear energy plant on a contested remote island were rushed through Parliament without sufficient scientific approval. The consequences of political-environmental oversight prefaced the apocalypse by disintegrating the weight of natural lore.

Scientists overlooked the 3.8 million litres of contaminated uranium waste tailings of mined uranium ore which were said to leak daily once the contested uranium mine’s operations began. The location of the mine: an exposed site near the biggest salt flat in the southern hemisphere, called Lake Air.

The alpha decay of the mined uranium had been leaking for years, releasing poison atoms from it’s waste-management facility. Particles of Radon-222 (plutonium as radioactive waste) entered living animal tissue, beginning a plague upon the living that is nearly impossible to avoid given the Radon-222 particles move wherever the air moves them. Radon-222 is seven times heavier than air, leaving a devastating trail of destruction when ingested into the body. Once Radon-222 enters the lungs a poison the width of 5 cell diameters begins to spread throughout the body, reaching the head in less than thirty seconds.

After years of leaking plutonium atoms attaching themselves to dust particles surrounding the site, a population of rabbits inhaled the particles while hunting prey in the desert. Just a few centuries before the area was home to lush vegetation and rich fauna which was now entirely infected. The rabbits bred and the rest can barely be imagined. The confusion of eating poison tore humanity apart.

Justice recalled a scientific report she had found that morning “all work locations should be upstream (upwind) of major radon sources.”

Justice looked at Peace, sighing with love and grief. They’d read such reports a hundred times and spent the same amount of hours wondering how politicians could be so nihilistic so as to poison and annihilate 25 billion people along with all known matter of plants and animals for the sake of riches and wealth on a screen.

Without clocks the world moved slow again. Economies were dead, survivors scarce and safe fresh food had disappeared within a year of the first plutonium-rabbit plague of 2146. Three sets of seasons later, supposedly 2149, Peace and Justice walked to their car as fine red sand kicked up a gust of wind. They hot-wired the engine and continued along the Nullabor, cracking open a can of tuna fish to share. In the most dangerous exposure area of the southern hemisphere, they hadn’t seen another human for years and figured, why love afraid when you can love brave?

If it was just them, their names predetermined their fate and complimented their determination to save another from loneliness. Peace and Justice had one lung each, so they took their breaths for the world soon to be restored and grown anew.

They drove the 83 remaining kilometres before they saw the contaminated site. They held hands and glanced again into each others eyes. The little crease next to Peace’s eye betrayed a tear. The intimacy of their eye contact in a sea of infected living beings unable to see them was the only thing keeping them moving and able to smile, cry or laugh… occasionally.

Once plutonium enters an animal’s lung it suffocates and dies slowly. When living things were first affected, a horrific scene of pain accompanied the flimsy, scrappy, document warnings about the ‘manageable’ risks of radioactive ore potentially entering the biosphere.

As an alpha emitter, mined uranium ore has an affinity to DNA. In the stories of the lands original inhabitants, told to generations of communities before the proposal of the mine site, various uranium rich areas were described as ‘sickness country’ where no-one hunted, dug or held ceremony. Nobody listened to the Elders which cost the Earth its humanity, flora and fauna all within a one hundred year time loop of ravaged cellular make-up for the sake of continuous electricity.

Somehow, Peace and Justice had avoided genetic deformities so they volunteered to take repairs at ground-zero.

Not going meant no-one else would go. Neither of them had seen another person for a long time now, it certainly felt like years.

As far as they had found, it was just them surviving on old Gondwanaland. They took solace in the

rainbows which reacted along the desert horizon. Justice remembered the advice she got from Morpheus before his lungs failed “when the rainbow appears again, you have the signal to begin”

Imperceptibly, the rainbow serpent stirred underneath.

Luckily, years before the collapse of the economy they had taken the advice of a Vietnamese woman who told them to hit the high seas. She had arthritis and her husband was deceased, so she gave them her sailing yacht and a bunch of diving gear. When they returned after a year she was dead. Her skin pores leaked blue blood and her eyeballs had bulged enough to explode out of her head. They found her half eaten and rotted away as wind-energy turbines spun uselessly in her backyard.

They began to piece the story together.

Prior to the economic collapse, the hierarchy of countries was competing for technological and scientific progress that would make or break successive Government’s on the highest human intelligence. Regrettably for all, uranium mined for nuclear energy fell into the hands of oppressed people without access to the scientific warnings of Radon-222 tailings.

The people were tired of watching television programs of scientists living in luxury hotels in outer space. Resistance to the economic divide of rich and poor began anew when a the world globalised and internet propaganda divided the people. One group of extremists had radicalised children on the internet by coercing their trajectories of each towards bomb-making experts and reasons to be angry at an unjust world. The children were hooked and threw caution to the wind.

Justice remembers the look on Peace’s face when she’d explained some traumatised children had been found guilty of blowing up the facility of magnetic computer tape recording the ins and outs of the global economy.

When salarymen woke up one Tuesday morning their data was wiped. No-one knew who was rich or who was poor as desperate people took the new state of the world in. The affluent neighbourhoods waged war against the poor which amplified the desperation.

What began as economic greed soon became a survival game of worst case scenario. Die of starvation, shame or exposure to plutonium. Over the century most people decided the best route out was to self-inflicted. The young began and the old followed.

The tragedy of ‘developed’ countries was the eventual turn to cannibalism.

This is the story Peace and Justice both believed and disbelieved. It was easy to agree on everything with one lung each. The way they saw each other, they knew they were spared for a reason.

Now, cautionary wind is everything.

They burn science papers to make fire every evening. What they learned is that fire is their means of survival. Air dies to make fire. So too burns their desire for the lands’ peace and justice from the inside.

23 hours drive from their location are hieroglyphs engraved in a cave they are yet to discover. Their destiny awaits their bravery. Moving at 200km an hour still, as with Earth’s rotations, they look at the horizon and each other so as to smile.

Back when Peace had to read about God in school classrooms which resembled work-places, they read Job 23:10b. Within a broken planet and watch all Peace needed was Justice. All Justice needed was Peace, so when they found a heart-shaped silver locked they split in two and wore half each. 


With half a lung and half a heart they finally knew all they needed to. Now, irrespective of seasons and clocks, was always theirs and forever would remain the time.

The time for peace is now and the time for justice is and always will be always.