Many years ago, years after the last world war, there was an illiterate goatherd on an abandoned island in the Philippines. He lived in extreme poverty among a small tribe of primitives who managed to avoid the destruction of the war by hiding in caves and drinking from subterranean springs. The goatherd lived alone on the barren land and learned to feed himself by watching what his goats ate. In return he protected his goats from the wolves, and cared for them when they suffered a minor injury. Then one day he had the opportunity to fix the broken arm of one of his fellow tribesmen after he had fallen off a steep cliff. The goatherd used the same simple methods he'd learned on his goats and the arm of his tribesman had healed. the man was grateful hand so anxious to repay this debt that he told many others of the great deed. In time, word spread across the islands of a goat man who could work healing upon animals and men, and his reputation grew far beyond his talents.

During this period, the sea was the primary means of travel and trade among survivors of the war. Many people lived on crude boats and traveled the waters up and down the coast cultivating small plots on shore to which they would return later for harvest. In this way the story of a healer spread throughout lands that had not been as devastated by the wars.

Along the northern parts of Africa, throughout the former Algerian and Libyan nations a group of desert dwellers had faired better than some during the war's aftermath. Their traditional ways had adapted them to the harsh conditions of the desert and their land was distant from the conflicts and upwind of the toxic storms. These people had grown strong in numbers but their culture remained primitive. The leaders of these men had heard the stories about the healer and were ruthless in their desire and sent a band of armed men to bring the healer back to their capital. A great feast was prepared and the healer was required to work miracles to prove his power. The healer failed the tests and the leaders with deep anger and disappointment had him beaten and thrown into a pit of vipers. The poor old goatherd lay in the bottom of the pit with the serpents for many days. He suffered sickness and injury and dreamed he was dying.

But among his former tribe was the man with the mended arm. He had witnessed his friend's abduction and had been powerless to stop it, but he was determined somehow to help him escape. This man was poor and had no way to buy a boat, but eventually he bartered his labor for passage to the far shores where he'd heard his friend had been taken. The man made his way to the distant capital and asked discreetly about the fate of the healer and was told that he was thrown into a pit and left for dead. The friend waited for nightfall and with a willow rope he scaled the steep walls of the pit and knelt beside the poor goatherd and listened carefully for the beat of his weakened heart. The old man was still alive and with much courage and fortitude the friend pulled his body from the pit, carried him in a stolen cart to a hiding place near the wharf where he hoped to smuggle him aboard a ship for China. The friend knew that the great country of China was a wonderland of freedom and plenty. He dreamed that if he could somehow get there, he could get his friend repaired. They lived for three weeks under the docks of the squalid wharf and finally the friend was able to smuggle the old man aboard an ancient vessel for the fabled country of Hong Kong. They hid in the hold of the old ship among Ethiopian and Somali slaves on their way to be sold in Manilla and Old Macau. The goatherd's health deteriorated, one arm turned black and an old witch doctor from Mogadishu took it off with a big knife one dark night as the ship rode the high tides into the teaming bays of the city.

Hong Kong is a magical city. The war had taken its wealth and most of the original population had died or fled, but in the years after the war it had become a center for all manner of survivors seeking the illusive promise of freedom. The once grand skyscrapers had been striped of their glass and transformed into tall gray skeletons emptied of the business of the world and converted to brutal towers for wild and unruly immigrants from everywhere and nowhere. Violence and disease clogged the streets as the rats ran among footsteps of millions of people from all over the world. For six days the friend desperately searched for a safe place to stop, and help for the injured goatherd. One dark night of cold drizzling rain, they sought shelter under the awning of a shop of a wily old necromancer. He sat watching them from the shadows under a pale haze of smoke from a long pipe. Like a ghost, he said in a low voice, "Step inside my friends, rest your wet bones on this soft couch." As the friend painfully guided the goatherd to a rough sitting position. The old man could plainly see that he was very ill. He rose from his rattan chair and stood looking down at the poor goatherd. He saw the black shoulder where the arm had been taken and the wound burnt off, he saw the pale face, drawn and sickly, he saw a deep gash on his skull where he had been viciously beaten, and he looked carefully at his broken and bloody hands.

"This is a very special man", The old necromancer rubbed his chin and brought out a cell phone, "I knew this was an important day when I woke up this morning," he said to himself, even though it was night, then he punched some buttons and talked in a foreign language to the phone. The friend didn't know what a phone was, and although he was confused, he was very tired and lost in a strange place and he had done all he could to help the poor goatherd. Somehow, he knew his job was done, and he felt great relief.

Sabeni Chaldea was the old man's name. He had practiced the Black Arts of necromancy since his father, now long dead, had taught him to conjure the Demons of Etemmu and the ancient methods of control over spirits of the dead. He was delighted to learn the story of the healer, for it seemed to fit precisely into his plans. He rambled on for an hour about the profound significance of the specific Sacrifice Horizon, While he talked he drank great draughts of blood wine and ate from a huge crust of black bread. He pushed bread into the old man's hands and urged him to tell more of the healer, but there was nothing more to tell, and soon the friend of the old goatherd fell fast asleep.

The old necromancer arranged for the goatherd to be taken to a small island far out in the bay. It was here that people came to begin the rudimentary restoration that would try to mend the sickness and injury the goatherd had suffered. Life is a fleeting thing, and if the the soul of this poor man had feet, one of them would be in heaven, and the other would be on earth. Several nights passed while numerous underground experts tried their best with whatever they had. The beatings had inflicted much damage: His jaw had been broken, his remaining arm was broken in two places. His skull was split in the back. and both legs were as rotten as the arm that had been removed on the old ship. His surgeons were ingenious and their choice of materials was both clever and imaginative, for the junkyards and supply houses were in much disarray after a brutal war. But from what was available, his doctors fashioned substitute implements that provided limited mobility and a rudimentary function of speech. Although his teeth were made of iron and his chest was open to the air, his new synthetic heart was taken from the innards of one of the most advanced robot drones available and securely protected in thick glass upon his chest.

During this rehabilitation the strange old man contacted others with whom he had been plotting since the end of the war. They gathered in secret vaults below a crumbling cathedral on the mainland and planned their challenge to the current cabal of governors and tribal leaders that had fought and regained power to govern the region after the war. The plan of the necromancer and his cohorts was one of truly evil intent. He had visions of a great army made up of the shattered souls left aimless after the war. Millions of these people wandered the cities and countryside, starving and hungry for food and direction. Many of these people were deeply mutated into a transient zombie state from the effects of the nuclear winter that had persisted over much of the globe for years after the war. Their minds were gone but their bodies would stay animate as long as they were fed a steady diet of special drugs. With this army, Sabeni would create an unstoppable divine force that would sweep out the small minded governors and retake the southern China coast and rule the great city of Hong Kong and all the riches of the world would return to his control. In Sabeni's unbalanced mind the lowly healer would become the Central Messiah of this new religion. It felt right to him, he was sure he had found the perfect individual to answer this call. To celebrate the final piece of the great plan, Sabeni went out into the dark night to find a special innocent, one of similar height and weight as he, and with a reasonable set of clothes. On the main thoroughfare under a streetlight, he saw a tall man exiting a carriage. Sabeni approached the man from behind and deftly slit his throat. He then stripped himself nude and took the clothes off the dead man and put them on himself. Then, with a flippant gesture, he strode back to his shop with his deviate purpose satisfied.  

In 2177 the official Messianic campaign to take over Hong Kong started in ernest. The humble goatherd was presented to the world as a genuine  God on Earth, with a strange inverted denial as proof of his profound humility and as thus, provided further undisputed proof of his Divine Nature. His birth was touted as much earlier than it actually was, his handlers claiming he was over 200 years old, He was carefully groomed and dressed in God-like clothing to form the centerpiece of a new religion based loosely on the Prophecies of the Pascha Elders. with the dark faces of the Vengence of the Inquisitor as internal security. The cult grew quickly in influence throughout the far east and the great army of the stoned zombies successfully stormed one government institution after another killing all resistance and in some cases actually eating the vanquished.

During these hard years the goatherd was drugged and held in brutal captivity. His physical body was all the Elders needed to illustrate their twisted proclamations. His manufactured utterances were held as sacred and published far and wide. For six years the Elders spread a message of confusion and fear, and amassed a great fortune. But the bigger the movement became, the more unwieldy and difficult it was to manage, and as they lost control, the Elders tasted panic. During their ambitious push into Africa the End itself became manifest. Deep in central Sudan, in Wad Madani, the old necromancer himself conceived a desperate plan to save the movement, they would actually crucify the Messiah, and by this momentous event they would regain valuable credibility and enough time by which they could resurrect their failing empire. Having no better solutions themselves, the Elders agreed with Sabeni, and in profound ignorance they carried out their plan.

High on a barren hill, carefully chosen for it's impressive dominance over the windswept desert. The Elders set out to stage their last performance. A rude wooden cross was planted in the stony ground.  They sent runners to the four directions of the compass to call for the faithful of the world to bear witness to a final act of divine justice. As a Betrayer of the True Way the Messiah must be crucified.  As a symbol of Evil, they claimed that had now brought them to such extreme measures, the poor Messiah was transformed into the Beast. Before the squinting eyes of many thousands on the vast empty desert, as the wind turned cold and the sky darkened, the goatherd was brought forth in chains. His body was raised aloft and the sharp metallic sound of hammers driving iron nails rang through the dry air. The thin wrists tore loose and ropes finally tied his slack form to the black body of the cross. The healer was left to die as the faithful abandoned their faith and wandered off aimlessly into the wilderness. The Elders stood too, blankly watching the spectacle's final moment, and becoming dimly aware that they were finally alone, that they had bet everything on a false idea, that all they had left was a deep regret. 

And among the last to leave was an old man, standing a respectful distance from the foot of the cross... waiting for nightfall. The old man was the last friend of the crucified healer and he had one more task to do. He had to take the body down from the cross, and secure it in a cave a hundred and forty meters from this place of dying.

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The laboratory was cold, and darkened-- except for the center of the room where a broad metal table sat under a bank of the purest white LEDs. Two men stood looking down at an object that was finally, firmly in their possession, or rather in the possession of the BBFR, the Institute of British BioFuture Research. They were Dr. Soren Lischentoff and his assistant, Richard Davis. They had been relentlessly pursuing this object for over six years, ever since it had surfaced in the Netherlander black market masquerading as an ancient Zoroastrian religious artifact.

"I know we need to record this guy on a matrix, doctor, but where to begin?" said Dick as he pulled on a new pair of white cotton gloves. The doctor seemed mildly amused as he looked carefully at the strange contraption in the form of a figure on a cross laying on the table in front of him.

"We will refrain from overreaching opinion at this point Richard," he said, "Our procedure will be to catalog all material and whatever method we can deduce without adversely affecting the object, with special care to isolate human remains and any earth based artificial technology."

"I could divide this chart with one vertical line, and label one column Human, and the other synthetic." Richard glanced expectantly at the doctor.

"Four columns, I think," said the doctor rubbing his whiskered chin and gazing at part of an old African Loom that formed the left hip of the figure."The first should be "natural', with subheads to include human remains, animal bones and anything thing else that isn't manmade. Then the remaining two can be Technology broadly defined as old and new. If we can keep this fellow on one matrix, all the better." The doctor seemed to relax with this decision, as if he were making this up on the fly-- which he certainly was.

Richard had one more question. "What about the light doctor?" he asked looking into one of the empty eye sockets on the ancient polished skull. Richard had been thinking about the "light" for weeks, anxious to begin experiments that would discover the origin, mechanical or otherwise that was responsible for the barely perceptible signal that had indicated on their most sensitive instruments. According to their electroneuronograph "something" was still alive inside the figure lying on the table, after how much time... four hundred years... or a thousand? who could tell?

Richard was not the only one who wanted to know the answer to that question.