The three friends are walking down the street – Doldaur, Doldaur Doldaur, and Doldaur Doldaur Doldaur. Mighty is their stride. Steadfast is their pace. Invulnerable are they to earthly, material weapons. In a world devoid of heroes they are an anathema. In a world devoid of honour, they are a conundrum. In an age where the micro-man is King, they are an anachronism. The three friends have no place here – they have no relation to this time that they have entered. They have no relationship to the Weltanschauung of this age and so why are they here?
Ours is a corrupt world, a worm-infested world, a maggoty world, a world within which any semblance of Glory is unknown. Instead of glory there is merely fame – one insect is worshipped by untold billions of other insects. None of us ever raise our heads from the data-feeds which we are tasked with monitoring. None of us ever look up from the office desks to which we are so ignominiously yoked. We perform our allotted functions – if not tirelessly and uncomplainingly, then at least unquestioningly. Ours is not to question why. We fulfil our routine obligations; we fulfil the role for which we have been trained. If there is Greatness in the world then it is no concern of ours. Our concern is to fulfil the routine operations for which we were bred. Greatness is not in our DNA. Our synthetic genes bear the corporate stamp; our nucleic acids have been copywrited.
Our age is an age that is not worthy of any name. Why name it? Why bother – it won’t go down in any legends. It’s all too tiresome, too tawdry, too tedious and too third-rate. Ours is not an age one can sing ballads about or tell epic tales about. Nothing ever happens here. Nothing is allowed to happen – the policies are too strict for that, the bureaucracies too thorough. What else are bureaucracies for, other than making sure that nothing ever happens? We are of course told that Great Things are going to happen – it’s just that we have to fill in the correct forms first. We have to make sure that everything goes through the proper channels; we have to do it by the book and then the Great Thing can happen. We’re all in favour of the Great Thing. We’re very much in favour of it – we just want to make sure that it happens in accordance with the official rules and regulations…
Nothing ever will happen here. This is the Maggot Realm. This is the Insect Realm. This is the Termite Realm – any rebel will be instantly set upon and torn apart by its fellows. To be different is to be destroyed here – the two things are synonymous. Any rebel will be instantly dismembered and devoured, its nutrients recycled and put to better use. It’s a long, long time since anyone thought for themselves in the Insect Realm. Group Think closes in on us before we are even out of kindergarten. It closes in like a shark and once it does there’s no getting away from those terrible jaws, no escaping that terrible Crescent Moon of Death.
And yet the three friends are walking down the street together, their weapons ready in their hands, fiery determination blazing from their eyes. They come from another age, another world, another dimension of being. They have stepped right out of the Mythic Realm of our Long-Forgotten Dreams. They come to avenge humanity – a humanity that doesn’t even know it needs avenging. They have come to challenge the dark power of the Controllers. They have come to deregulate the Regulators. They have come to smite Old Greyface right where it hurts…
