Night Sessions, The by Ken MacLeod

the Sozi interregnum, the restoration, the Second Enlightenment. Ferguson, like Isla, had endured them all. It was in the last that he'd been a participant. At the time it had felt good. Even the bad things he'd done had felt good. He'd wanted to grind the God-botherers into the dust. The mood of revulsion against the Faith Wars had crystallised around the notion of a Second Enlightenment, one that would separate not merely the Church from the state, but religion from politics, and from public life altogether.
    The fall of the great religious establishments had been as swift and sudden as that of communism. After decades of religious inspiration or exacerbation of terrorism, fundamentalism, apocalyptic wars, creationism, climate-change denial, women's oppression, poverty, ignorance and disease, it was payback time. In a variety of forms, secularism had swept the board in all the advanced countries. No politician with any religious taint had a chance of national election. Every prohibition influenced by religion had been repealed. Every trace of religious influence had been excluded from the education system, and no exemptions from the secular state education system were allowed.
    The faith-heads had called it the Great Rejection, and that, Ferguson thought, was just what it had been. Rejection—that was what he'd felt. Never religious himself, there had been nothing personal about it: just a cold, hard determination that the reforms would be enforced. The reforms had had passive majority support and active minority opposition, expressed in everything from sit-down protests in the playgrounds of faith schools, through vehement denunciation, to terrorism.
    The conflict had been complicated by the disarray of the state: the intelligence and security services were discredited and derided, and werebeing systematically purged. Torture had been at least formally abolished, and was generally abhorred. The armed forces, shattered by defeat and severely cut back, were useless for internal security. The full brunt had been borne by the regular police.
    The God Squads had faced down the spasm of religious reaction, and as a young PC Ferguson had been right in there swinging. He'd battered through congregations to drag seditious priests and mullahs from their very pulpits. He'd slung screaming schoolchildren in the back of police vans, then turned and batoned down their parents and slung them in too. In the two worst years of the civil disorder he'd shot, up close, three men and one woman, and he'd taken part in more beatings than he liked to recall. It had not been the cold, scientific torture of the Faith War years; it had been done in rage and frustration, and it had been the sort of thing that coppers had done in police cells routinely a generation or two back. But he never remembered it without shame.
    “It's not like the bad times, yet,” he said to Isla. “I don't think it'll come to that. What gives me the creeps is the thought that something like this can still happen, after…all we did back then.”
    Isla seemed to realise that this would be the most that she'd get out of him on the subject.
    “Well,” she said, “it wasn't all bad times.”
    She deftly switched the conversation to a lighter note. Their younger daughter, Niamh, a design student at Telford's, was in the throes of being a bridesmaid for one of her friends. These throes included designing her own dress, based on one seen in the background of her friend's grandmother's wedding pics: Isla waved her hands and talked about “blancmange” and “flanges.” Ferguson listened with wryly feigned interest. His and Isla's own wedding had been a simple affair, in the Victoria Street registry office. He'd thought at the time that one consequence of secularisation would be that weddings would remain like that. No such luck, it seemed.
    When they'd finished their drinks Isla suggested they have another. Ferguson broke his habit and agreed. They caught the last