Jill Kaiser sat alone before her main, full-sized T-window, watching an ad for STOPIT and nursing her fourth glass of Scotch. She was sulking. She had a right to sulk. It was she, after all, who got things going with Jack Fleetwood and Dr. Gidarb. Yet, nowhere was there a word of acknowledgment that she had a thing to do with STOPIT’s subsequent success in the war on smut. If it weren’t for her, the Gidarb procedure legislation passed in fourteen states, would not have been introduced. It would not be pending in twenty-two others. And Jack Fleetwood would still be searching for a national campaign theme to set him apart from other leading candidates for the American Party’s Presidential nomination.

Jill stared into the telewindow with fierce attention to a STOPIT master programmer giving a demonstration on ELF creation and animation. The object of the exercise was to counter the argument by Blue Monday’s defense that no real people were involved in his programs, by showing how difficult it was to create a convincing ELectronic Facsimile from scratch.

The programmer began with a mechanical drawing of a woman in three views. The process took so long in real time that an accelerated version of the process had to be shown with a digital clock in the upper right corner of the window marking the weeks in 10 second intervals. Making the drawing in real time took well over a week. A 3-D model he made from the sketch took over twice as long. The simple act of climbing two steps and opening a door required another 46 hours. Total elapsed time: 26 days, 4 hours and 32 minutes.

He then made a scan of a real woman climbing stairs and opening a door, and created an ELF from the scan. Total elapsed time: 29 seconds.

Jill wondered how intoxicated a person had to be to swallow that nonsense. Whether Monday began making his ELFs from sketches or body scans was irrelevant. By the time he finished, they were his own unique creations.

Glen, who wasn’t a master programmer, showed Jill and Chucky how simple it was to create a whole roomful of people of both sexes, various body-types and all races from a single scan, in less than a day. An extensive library of motion could be compiled in a matter of months or downloaded from an existing library in seconds. From then on, they could be written into the actions and interaction of any ELF or combination of ELFs in the time it would take a short story writer to write a story. The language of ELF animation was so close to standard English that a literate child, like Jill’s son Chucky, could do it easily.

That was the biggest danger of what men like Blue Monday were doing with their ELFs. They were expanding the range of conceivable possibilities for children, like her son, to write similar pornographic programs of their own. Children could turn whatever filth their little minds could dream up into realistic, three-dimensional, action scenes by simply describing in sufficient detail what they wanted to see. All they needed was something to start with, like that disk she found hidden in Chucky’s bedroom.

It had been two hours since Jill had seen or spoken to anyone. That, to her, was an eternity. Chucky was staying with his paternal grandparents in Wisconsin, Glen was working late at the office or the lab or somewhere on the road. Her oldest and dearest friend Kimmy Fleetwood was avoiding her, her parents were dead, and she hadn’t been on speaking terms with her brother and sister in a decade.

She was alone.

She hated being alone. It was cruel, unnatural and unfair. She had always been so popular at school, at summer camp, the country club, and in all of the church and civic organizations she belonged to. Now that she was an active member of STOPIT, her friends seemed to have faded away. All she had left were other STOPIT members like Jack Fleetwood’s press secretary, Jennifer Bertalewski, and Bridget Piper, the wife of Condor Industries' CEO.

Her old friends acted friendly enough in her presence, for the most part, but they never called, they never visited and she sensed that her calls and visits to them were unwelcome. Kimmy had treated her that way from the beginning of their long relationship. But that was just her way. It didn’t mean anything. At any rate, Jill never thought it did, until now. Even Glen was acting more distant.

What went wrong? thought Jill, feeling the hollow pain of loneliness as intensely as she had felt the pain of grief at her mother’s recent funeral. Tears welled up from that bitter spring of pain and spilled out of her eyes in torrents. The empty room of the empty house seemed to mock her. There was no one to comfort her. She clasped her hands together and she prayed, "Dear God, please tell me what’s happening."

And the Lord answered, saying unto her, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be persecuted—" or something like that.

Jill felt the sense of the Lord’s words even if she wasn’t sure of the words themselves. It was literally a sobering experience. Jesus was with her, wrapping her in his loving arms, absorbing her pain into His bosom. It was a warm, spiritual, intensely intimate sensation—almost sexual. No! Not sexual! Not sexual!

Jill wrestled with words to replace the wrong one that had slipped out of her mind, and in the process, lost the feeling she was trying to describe. She was now as frustrated as she had been aroused. No! No! No! Not aroused...elevated. Yes, elevated! The troubled waters of her conflicting emotions smoothed out with the introduction of the right word into her thought processes. She understood what had happened in Biblical terms. It had been nothing less than a fight with the devil!

She looked at the drink in her hand and the Johnny Walker Black bottle it was poured from. It was Glen’s Scotch. She didn’t have a license to consume alcoholic beverages.

The law that kept adults like herself, who could not pass the Alcohol Consumption Test, from buying and drinking any consumable product with an alcohol content of 3% or more, had always made some sense to her. Now, with Jesus beside her, it made a deeper sense, one that was likely to stick with her. Unlike Prohibition, which was sold to Congress as a moral issue and applied to everyone, the ACT, was sold as a public health and safety issue. A good look at how alcohol’s unrestricted use in mainstream America corresponded to the alcohol related crimes, diseases and fatal accidents in New Economic Zones, told that story in terms no one could honestly deny. But now, Jesus was telling her that the moral argument was the one Christians should have abided by all along.

Jill took the glass and the bottle to the kitchen, where she emptied their contents into the sink and tossed them in the rubbish bin. She opened the cabinet where Glen kept his beer and she threw out all of those cans and bottles, too. Jesus told her to get rid of the beer glasses and the liquor glasses along with all of the other beer and alcohol in the house. She carried out the wishes of the Lord with zest, getting high on the knowledge that she was doing His will.

She understood so many things now that God had answered her prayer and shown her the way. She understood that she had been chosen by Jesus to help clean up His America, whether she was appreciated or not. She understood that she had to be clean herself to do His work through STOPIT. And she understood, as she never did before, that NEZs were necessary for the free choice He gave all of His children to pursue good or evil. People who wanted to use alcohol, tobacco, or other dangerous drugs, to fornicate and rob and murder and indulge their perverted lifestyles could live in a NEZ. It was their God-given choice. But where the NEZ mentality intruded on the real America, it was the responsibility of real Americans to stamp it out!

Her immediate task complete, Jill returned to the family room where she sat down in front of the T-window to do something she had intended to do for years. She was going to study the flashback recorded, ELF-enhanced, King James version of the Scriptures, edited for family viewing by the Ordained Biblical Scholar Committee of Condor Broadcasting International. She didn’t know precisely what she was going to see and hear because there were so many competing T-window versions of the Lord’s Word. But that would be settled within the hour.

The first thing she did was call the pastor of her church. She told him of her religious experience and what she thought it meant. He not only agreed with her, but confided a similar experience with his addiction to masturbation. God’s answer to his prayer had been the telewindow appearance of Estelle and Euel Gidarb on the Sharon and Louise Show. He was now on a waiting list to undergo the Gidarb procedure and was writing a proposal to clergymen of all faiths that the procedure be a requirement for ordination. He wasn’t sure what to do with his proposal, but he was a man of influence in the national religious community and he was sure that Jill’s call to him at that moment was a sign from God that he was doing the right thing.

Jill knew that STOPIT’s family counselors wouldn’t have considered him for the procedure without his wife’s consent, so she didn’t think to ask him how she felt about it. The fact that there was a waiting list of volunteers was, however, a revelation which gave her a more compassionate Christian view of why men like Blue Monday should be Gidarbed. Maybe STOPIT’s Sexual Aberration Test could be used on all males at puberty to Gidarb the potential Mondays, rapists, pedophiles, homos, do-it-yourselfers and the like, before they acted out their perverted sexual potential....

When Glen returned to the house, his wife was sitting serenely before the family room telewindow watching an ELF-animated scene from the story of Lot with ambient sound. Jill told him what it was and asked him to join her. He did, partly out of curiosity about that Joan of Arc look on her face and her new interest in the Bible, but mostly out of guilt. He felt guilty for cheating on his faithful wife and for having told Vera that he was going to leave Jill for good if their Full Immersion Social Interactive Garment worked well enough to market. He didn’t honestly know what he was going to do.

Taking his hand lovingly in hers, Jill gave him a saintly smile. His burden of guilt grew heavier in his heart. Perhaps Jill had been touched by the Spirit in some way. Perhaps it was God’s will that he stay with her to convince her that she was wrong about the STOPIT crusade. He and Vera were the only ones who knew how everybody involved was linked to everybody else. They were the only ones who knew that if anybody in this whole intrusive affair was right, it was Blue Monday. And Glen was the only one who knew that if any two people were right for each other, it was Blue and Kim. If Jill had felt touched by God that night, she wasn’t the only one.

Glen watched Abraham questioning God’s judgment in deciding to destroy everyone and everything in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and getting Him to agree by degrees not to if He could find 10 good men in them. The angels God sent to check things out were slim, blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned good-looking males, like P.J. Shields. Lot brought them home to his wife and daughters as guests. The angels in Lot’s home were almost immediately propositioned by a huge swarm of sex-crazed, tongue-wagging, prehistoric "rough trade" and drag queens outside. Lot, gracious host that he was, went outside to offer his virgin daughters to the mob in their place.

I wonder what the daughters thought of that deal, thought Glen. What kid of angels would look with favor on a man like that? If he was so righteous, why didn’t he tell those freaky-looking cocksuckers to go fuck themselves? If he had to offer them somebody, why didn’t he offer himself?

Glen had read the story in a printed Bible as an adolescent and fleetingly wondered the same things about the concept of sexual morality as illustrated by that story. Fearing the wrath of God, who destroyed two cities and damn near every man, woman and child therein because he didn’t like the way they had sex, Glen had been afraid to think about it, so he didn’t. As an adult who knew how unlikely it was for over ninety-nine percent of the population of any two cities, including San Francisco and New York to practice abnormal sex, he did think about it. He couldn’t help it. Intrusive bodies of law and custom were written around that story, which were used for centuries to force majority populations into acts of conformity which were unnatural for them and to persecute minorities who would not or could not conform.

Now, after his eye-opening conversation with Vera about Charm, he could see in this rendering of Lot's predicament what made the top-heavy comedian so dangerous to the state. The longer he watched the more he saw why her Fairy King joke had been the last straw. Now I get it! he thought, Charm's Fairy King was the King James story of Lot with the roles of the leader and the unruly multitudes reversed. Either way it was essentially about forced sexual conformity. If an individual, rather than the state, were doing it to anonther individual it would be called rape.

Glen’s marriage to Jill was an act of conformity which may have grown out of this story and denied him the pleasure of sex acts that were natural to him and Vera, or exciting for them to watch because they were unnatural. In that light, his marriage to Jill, the ultimate conformist, was as onerous as if he and been tossed to the Sodomites in his youth.

Jill squeezed her husband’s hand affectionately. This was what they should have been doing together every night instead of worrying about whether to rut like animals because the secular media put so much emphasis on sex. There was far more satisfaction to be derived from studying the scriptures and this was a way the whole family could enjoy the experience together, to hear and to see the Word of God in action.

She smiled at Glen, seeing that goofy, open-mouthed expression of his that meant he was studying hard.

Glen knew he wasn’t looking at a flashback, not only because of the King James English everyone spoke in perfect sync with their lip movements, but because other things were out of sync with time. The ornate silver bracelets worn by Lot’s daughters were as anachronistic as wristwatches. The paper scroll on the table was no less absurd than an electric typewriter and the raw-cut edge of the table could have been made only with a hard-metal saw, which was unknown in that time and place.

Turning to his wife, Glen asked, "Do you see anything wrong with this, shit?"

She gave him a look of horror, that he should say such a thing about the holy Word, then shushed him and went back to the program, quickly absorbing herself in it once more.

Jesus, he thought, maybe I shouldn’t have said, shit. He meant it both ways. By studying her face, he would have had his answer without letting her know the question. They had recently seen the same archeology series on the Explorer channel, which told him how to spot what was out of place in time. Jill was no dummy unless she wanted to be. She must have wanted it very much to miss the problems of credibility created by the errors in fact that only an incompetent truth teller or a reckless liar could have made.

If it was heresy to question the veracity of patently untrustworthy American ELF makers purporting to tell the true story of Sodom and Gomorrah with old words and new pictures, where could he go from there? How could he begin to question the veracity of the English King James scribes purporting to translate the ancient Hebrew text, let alone the ancient Hebrew scribes purporting to tell the Word of God?

Wasn’t it at least possible that those guys with the status of holy men and the transformative technology of writing in their exclusive control, had hidden agendas—that they were not conduits of truth but inventors of propaganda? Couldn’t they have had ideas of their own about the proper role of men and women in their society and the essential wickedness of anyone who didn’t share their tastes in sex? With stories only they could convey through writing, couldn’t they have been trying to do for their idea of morality what the high priests of communication in the last century did for their idea of peace?

Glen wondered if the story tellers’ emphasis on homosexuality was a way of not addressing rape as the essential issue, notwithstanding the reference in Jude, centuries later, to "fornication" and "going after strange flesh?" Rape was what the Sodomites had in mind for Lot’s male guests and what Lot had in mind for the Sodomites to do to his daughters so he wouldn’t look like a bad host.

In short order, the wicked cities in the plain were rained on with fire and brimstone. The ground beneath them shook and they were razed in an orgy of flaming bodies, falling stone columns crushing the life out of effeminate men and painted women; of spurting blood and belated cries of mercy from the damned. It went on and on with Jill relishing every agonizing moment. Apparently it was okay to enjoy the torment of others as long as they were wicked people, according to the story of Lot. Glen hadn’t seen his wife that aroused in a long time. In fact, he had never seen her in such a state. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to let herself go and find out what an orgasm was.

It occurred to Glen that his wife may have had a "Lot" in common with the Brown Belt Strangler. He had no doubt that she was having a sexual experience with the T-window program, regardless of how she would have defined it. He guessed that her zeal in pursuing Estelle Gidarb’s dream had a similar basis in her own sexual needs. If ever there was a terrifying thought for a married man, that was it.

He remembered what Kimberly told him about the rise in Jack’s pants at the prospect of Gidarbing numberless nameless men. Could God-fearing people like Jack and Jill have gotten a rise out of what they were trying to do to these men they labeled sexual perverts without the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to tell them they were doing God’s work? He doubted it.

The big question was this: Why was it so hard for time track engineers to recover actual time tracks of these chapters in the book of Genesis, and other events in the Bible that had such far-reaching repercussions for believers and non-believers alike? Why weren’t time tracks available of the men who wrote the stories? It took extraordinary mental alacrity to avoid such questions. So far Jill was managing extraordinarily well, tossing out whatever facts didn’t fit her convictions and filling in whatever was necessary.

Glen wondered how the T-window Bible was going to show Lot’s wife being turned to a pillar of salt, or his daughters plying him with wine to have sex with him when they thought he was the last man on earth. He wondered how much of the wicked women’s humping of the Godly man in a drunken stupor or a drunken sleep would be shown—if, indeed, their actions were wicked under the circumstances. Glen had always been damn curious about the details of how they pulled it off—of how anybody that old and drunk could get a hard-on and impregnate his two children on back-to-back nights without knowing what he had done.

As Glen expected, the incestuous sex scenes in the cave where they were living, were not shown at all. When the older daughter proposed her plan for committing incest with their father to conceive his children, the window went blank. A voce-over read the last four verses in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, describing in general what happened and naming the children of the union.

Glen hauled out a light-pen and closed the window.

"Why did you do that?" asked Jill with a 60/40 mixture of vexation and fear in her face and pure confusion in her voice.

Glen looked at her for a long time trying to see whether she could read anything in his face. It should have been easy. It was the same face he was wearing when he asked if she saw anything wrong with the T-window version of Sodom and Gomorrah. "I can’t believe you sat through that crap—"

"Glen! You shouldn’t say things like that about the Bible."

"What Bible, the one passed down from generation to generation in bits and pieces by word of mouth until somebody invented the alphabet and somebody else wrote it down? Is that the Bible you’re talking about?"

Jill frowned, "You know what I’m talking about."

"No I don’t. I come home and see you watching this ELF theater production of Genesis like it was the real thing."

"It is the real thing," said Jill firmly, before he could continue. "It’s just another way of showing it."

"But don’t you see anything that might have been added or lost or fucked-up in the translation?"

Jill winced at the profane word but let it pass. "Like what?" she asked.

"Like lots of things...That destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah scene must have gone on for ten minutes. In the Good Book, it’s over in about five seconds. And where did that earthquake come from? It doesn’t say anything about an earthquake in the book."

"Yes it does," insisted Jill.

"Let’s look it up."

Jill got up and told Glen to stay where he was as she left the room. Waiting anxiously for his wife’s return, he thought, Maybe there was an earthquake. Where did I get the idea that there wasn’t? Oh, yeah, God. He was thinking of the T-window show with Hector Clay, the guy somebody was laughably trying to discredit with bad ELFs on the X Channel. Hector Clay was the one who said there was no earthquake in Sodom and Gomorrah. Glen had taken it on faith that he was right. Well, maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. One thing he had certainly been right about was the way Abraham and Lot got away with talking back to God, telling Him to His face that He was fucking up. That’s what Glen was going to hit Jill with when she got back no matter what they discovered about the earthquake.

Jill returned with the sacred scriptures sooner than Glen expected. Sitting close to him, she opened it to Kings, flipped through the onion-skin pages, pausing briefly at Judges, Numbers and Exodus before backing into Genesis.

"Go to the nineteenth verse," said Glen.

"There’s no rush," replied Jill, scanning each page from the fiftieth chapter back to the thirty-third.

Glen reached across his body and turned several pages at once.

"Stop." said Jill, pointing at a reference to Sodom in Chapter 13, verse 13. "’And the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly,’" she read aloud.

The irksome irrelevance of that observation to whether or not an earthquake had been involved in the destruction of Sodom, showed on Glen’s face. He went three leafs forward in the book to Chapter 19. Jill found the operative verse first.

"Here it is," she said while Glen was still searching. "Verse 25. ‘And He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and that which grew upon the ground.’"

Glen looked askance at his wife, whose quickness he had once mistaken for superior intelligence. "Are you kidding? God overthrew the cities with ‘brimstone and fire,’" he said, quoting the words in the verse above the one Jill had just read. "’Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.’ That’s it."

Jill shook her head. "Wrong. He rained brimstone and fire. Then, "She stood her forearms upright with her hands in front of her face, "He overthrew, the cites." Her arms collapsed to the side the way brick towers and wooden support columns had done in the T-window earthquake.

While grudgingly conceding that Condor Broadcasting’s Ordained Biblical Scholar Committee, might have gotten that one right, he wasn’t prepared to agree that they had.

He asked Jill about the scroll and the bracelets.

"What about them?" she said. "People in different places were centuries apart technologically, just as they are now. The cities in the plain could have learned how to do a lot of things that were lost with them."

"Okay," said Glen, with a feeling that he and his wife were mutually engaged in different pursuits. Jill was demonstrating Hector Clay’s observation that, "For every destination of truth one wishes to arrive at, there is a pathway of possibilities that can take you there." Maybe he was doing it himself. But, if Jill wasn’t asking herself questions like that, it was silly to think he could change her thinking about anything built on the foundation of this story.

He asked her if it didn’t make sense that Lot’s wife, who wasn’t warned what would happen if she looked back, would do it when her married daughters were being napalmed in Sodom along with her sons-in-law. Jill said it was a question of obedience to God. Glen asked why the same reasoning didn’t apply to all the questioning of God that Abraham and Lot did. She said it wasn’t the same but couldn’t explain the difference. He asked what Jill had to say about the sins of the daughters of Lot who were married to Sodomites. She told him that those daughters must have been as wicked as their husbands or God would not have destroyed them along with the city.

That was too much for Glen. "But their father brought them to the city and probably arranged the marriages. It wasn’t like they had a choice. And how about the servants of all the rich people like Lot and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah? How about the little children, the pets, the fucking plants—what did they do to deserve the same fate as the wicked men?"

Jill eyed her husband suspiciously, "Why are you defending the homos? Why do you always stick up for them? Do you still think homosexuality is normal?"

"I think it’s amazing," he said, honestly.

"I don’t want to hear any more." Jill rose looking down on her husband in disgust."