The Cabral Discovery & More SciFi Shorts

by

Jake Berry Ellison Jr.

Copyright © 2018 Jake Berry Ellison Jr.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1723231967

ISBN-13: 978-1723231964

Eating the Goo-ies

Working on the principle that things are always worse than you think, Adam ordered another pint and asked the tattooed bartender if he'd heard about it.

"I've heard just about everything," the guy said. He opened the tap on the Manny's and filled the glass. He placed it on the circular coaster. "What's it now?"

"Maybe it will be on the news. I don't want to spoil it."

The bartender shrugged and moved down the short counter and put his mind to rest, it appeared to Adam. He finished the beer, put cash on the counter and walked the three blocks back to the clinic. What he'd seen had called for a beer.

At the door to the neighborhood clinic on the outer industrial edge of the teaming city, a nurse stepped out and blushed when she glanced up and identified who'd pulled the door open for her. There will be a lot of that soon. Perhaps, since Adam can't have seen the only man in the city and the history of the world to ejaculate black semen, millions of people around the globe already couldn't look each other in the eye without a snicker, a panic, a jealousy, a question, a flash of shame, a moment of embarrassment remembering the ink spots on the bed sheets.

"Watch the video."

"Use your words. I've got a lot to do and I'm almost out of time."

"If I say it, you'll think it's a trick or I'm joking or ..."

"... You've been drinking."

"When you see this, you'll want to too. Besides, I'm not seeing any more patients today."

"Good. You know how much people get all wound up when their doctor shows up drunk. But, hey, what's a little more work for me?"

"Just watch the video."

"I'm watching. It's a trick. You are joking. I've really got a lot to do, especially now that you've decided to get drunk and fuck off the rest of the day."

"It's not a trick. I was right there videoing it."

"That's got to be a violation of something."

"He volunteered."

"Still. What do you think? Squirted ink in his urethra?"

"Look at the slides."

"Hmmmmm"

"Call the county. I'll contact the other clinics. I've searched online already and found a rock band named that and several satanic rituals said to cause it but no confirmable medical cases, though there must be thousands out there. Maybe millions. This kind of thing never just happens to one person."

"Post it on YouTube. Crowd source it. If it's happening elsewhere, they'll be searching for it."

"Good idea. It'll get flagged though."

"Not immediately. Put the phone number for the hotline on there. Not the clinic's name though."

Two hours later, as Adam had suspected, the hotline was ringing off the hook.

"What! What the hell! Jonathan!"

"I ..." kneeling before his spread-eagled wife as if ready to catch anything that came out of there but surprised by what offered itself up. "Hey, I have not been sleeping around."

"Sleeping around! You just came black sperm all over me and the bed!"

"Man, that's ... " He shook his head while staring at her stomach, vagina and the sheet between her legs. The stuff was semen like in its liquid squid viscosity, but pure ink black.

"Did you have pain?"

"No. I didn't feel anything ... unusual." He dabbed his finger into the gelatinous clumpy blob diffusing into the eggshell blue satin.

"You've got to go to the doctor."

"Let's just wait a minute. Hold on." He vigorously rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. Going to the doctor for this kind of thing would mean blowing off the entire day. "Let's look it up first."

He was the second caller into the clinic's hotline, usually reserved for suicides or dumb questions.

The first caller was a mechanic who made the call from his cellphone from inside of what sounded to the hospital staff listening to the day's recordings to be a bathroom.

"Ewuuu," one intern said.

"Okay," said one of the men from the CDC running the clinic meeting. "Let's figure what's in the semen and go through the logs to figure out where this infection anomaly started."

No one knew what "logs" he was talking about, but they all understood what he meant and so they got to it.

One of the young interns split from the others and entered a private bathroom and faced head-on the dilemma of arousing himself under these circumstances in order to see if he had been infected. He worked at it.

He was the only male doctor-to-be at the hospital to think to do so at that moment, but all of the female doctors and nurses had already thought about the male doctors and running similar experiments. However, they did not think of the problem of trying to ejaculate without arousal. Had they, they might have lent a hand. However, they, for the most part, just automatically thought of the act as a mechanical matter, especially those with teenage boys at home.

One nurse did think about drawing the semen out with a needle and syringe. She told the doctor on the floor of the hospital where the first young man to be quarantined for black semen was housed. The young man agreed to the procedure, but the fluids were normal. When the nurse asked him to ejaculate, he did so with the kind of aplomb that makes some people much better lovers than others.

The semen in the cloudy plastic cup he handed the nurse was black.

"This came out of you?"

"Indeed it did, ma'am."

The next day was pandemonium at every clinic and hospital in the city.

"Either this is the fastest spreading infection ever or most of these people have been living with a secret. How will they ever figure out where it started?"

It seemed to Adam that the best they could hope to do would be to figure out roughly when, where and from what the infection (he didn't know what else to call it) had jumped into the population.

By the end of the day, it was as he had feared.

The bell curve for when people reported first noticing their semen had turned black stretched out over several weeks with two-weeks ago the median. One 57-year-old man, an outlier—there are always a few—said it had always been like that for him and he'd only come in because his wife had seen it on the news. He might be the carrier, several said, but the carrier of what, no one had a clue.

For roughly nine months, Adam, whose sperm had remained its normal color, had been anticipating this moment—they had seen the patterns that suggested it among miscarriages and abortions, heard the testimonies and declarations of faithfulness and the promises but until this one birth from an artificial insemination using black sperm, they could not know for certain that the sperm was able to germinate an egg and produce a healthy baby.

"It's black!"

"She's black!"

"... of course. She. She. I didn't mean otherwise. It's just a surprise. You have to be surprised at it too."

"David! This is our child, our baby. A human being. Not an experiment and I won't hear any more of that talk from you!" She was screaming and her heaving to get the screamed words punctuated properly was interfering with Adam's ability to sew up her perineum. In addition to being ink black, the baby's head was big, though not completely out of the range of normal. But pretty darn big, it seemed to Adam.

"You're going to have to relax, Mrs. Eller. Mr. Eller? Perhaps you can take your daughter down to the prenatal ward with Nurse Bob?"

"Sure sure sure ... honey honey ... I'm in love with her. I am in love with my daughter Krissy Ann."

"You better be."

"Go on now, so we can all get through this."

His name and their names will be written down along side Krissy Ann Eller, who probably wasn't the first baby born this way, after all the infection had spread across the globe, but would be recorded as the first definitive one. Would their names be recorded in a history of an anomaly that happened on a global scale, like the pandemics of old, or would their names be written as the pioneers in the first moments when humanity changed forever?

Hard to know, Adam considered.

By the end of the second year of this pandemic, every baby on the planet was born black—black hair, black skin, black eyes, iris and sclera, black teeth, black gums, everything. The children's brains, too. However, all the stuff on the inside was the normal color. Blood, thankfully, every phlebotomist thought, remained red. The color of health and normalcy. Now, the black brain tissue did have scientists across the board worried about the longterm health and mental capacities of the children. They appeared normal and active, but who knows what kinds of retardations this anomaly might provoke.

At first, the people who used to be called black said things jokingly like, "It's about time." and "Man, I thought I was black." And the album by Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet received a fresh round of attention and refilled the band's coffers and filled out the band's performance schedule. White people, fearing charges of racism said things like, "Well, he's still our little Jeffery. He's got my eyes. The shape anyway." And joked: "How will we ever tell them all apart!" Ha ha ha.

That first year, the governments of the world had to wage public health campaigns, establish warehouses to shelter and care for all of the abandoned babies as well as to incarcerate all the people who had killed their black babies. But by the second year, no more babies were abandoned, abused or killed than had been before, since now all babies were born that way. The cacophony of conspiracies in every form of media had died down too. Since every child born on the planet was the same total color, the remaining theorists focussed mostly on who was to blame and to speculate when the hero of red, white, yellow or "true black" would have the virility to engender a reversal of fortunes for the world's populations.

By the second year, these theories had fallen out of fashion and were despised because they suggested that the children were sick or unwanted, which they were not or not more than the generations of children before them.

Adam had told his story of discovery and the first test-tube experiment that proved transmission that by the end of the third year, everyone on the planet had heard it. And, since he was a smart businessman as well as a pretty good general practitioner, he grew very wealthy. The black had put Adam in the green. The only hitch for Adam was that he had not caught the infection, if that was what it was and he had to keep that quiet. Otherwise, people would assume he caused it and left his own fluids as they always had; or, he had the antidote. He had no idea why his fluids had remained the same, but he wasn't taking any chances on getting lynched so he refused to have children or to explore publicly what made him different or how many like him there may be in the world. Besides, he rationalized, by the time he'd known for sure his semen would not change, the world had been populated with black babies. So, what would have been the point? Just more agony and infanticide would have followed.

Despite the fact that Adam's story had been so widely broadcast and gone virile online, the story nevertheless morphed into a creation story of almost no resemblance to the original facts, a creation story for the first generation of The Blacks.

Essentially it came down to this: God, tired of the fighting and bickering on Earth, sent down this New Seed, The Black Seed, to eliminate all discrimination and violence based on appearances. And it seemed to have worked! In fact, crime had plummeted (after the first rash of infanticides) and charitable giving had skyrocketed. People had stopped polluting and eating junk food in such large numbers that whole global corporations imploded.

"Mommy?"

"Yes, dear?"

"Why are you so different?"

"Well, what do you mean?"

"Why is your skin all pale and gooey looking?"

"Be nice now and finish up your peas."

"Mommy?"

"What? Always more questions with you."

"I don't think you should be allowed to live."

"Why Krissy Ann! Where did you get ideas ... sit back down right his minute .. stop now ... stop ..."

Adam, the rich and the wise doctor who knew all there was to know about The Blacks and had been on every television staton in the world talking about what it might mean and not mean had been the first to point out that scientists, while not seeing much structural change to the tissues of the brain, could not predict what psychological or mental changes these children would under go. They seemed to be developing mentally much faster than their earlier peers, for one. And for another, they seemed to want to eat flesh. That based on the testimony of a few thousand people whose children had grown up enough to talk and walk and express and act on the desire to kill and eat them.

By the end of the sixth year, millions of black children had killed and eaten at least some of portion of their parents, older siblings and neighbors. They also developed a very distinct smell that became extremely offensive when in the presence of their older, non-black siblings and parents.

"They have to be rounded up and exterminated!"

"Are you crazy?"

"They're running around killing and eating their parents! What do you suggest Senator? Handing out packets of salt and pepper?"

"They are not all ... "

"Some don't but even those express the desire."

"... they have to be studied and contained sure but there are hundreds of millions of them around the world. We couldn't round them all up if we had to. Besides, I have black grandchildren. I'm not going to hack them to death in their beds for God's sake! Besides, the troubled ones are already out there in the streets, living like animals. Hunt them down and warehouse them. Those facilities must still be available."

"They sure took care of the rat problem.'

"Ha ha.”

"Well, we've got to do something. I'm naming you Czar of the Department of Black Problems."

"It's like the 1950s all over again."

"Well, Congressman, what do you suggest?"

"Find their leaders and reason with them. Extermination or cohabitation.”

"We've tried that. They don't have any leaders."

"Let's ship them to a big island and leave 'em there."

"And what then? Even if we could round up most of them, we have reports that they have already begun breeding and can bear a child every three to five months."

"Who was that doctor who started this, what's his name?"

"Adam."

"Funny. That's right, Dr. Adam. What's he say?"

"He's gone into hiding or been killed." 

"How did we ever get into this mess?"

"God only knows."

Adam, loved by the black children with an intensity bordering on sexual fever, couldn't leave his house. They were everywhere. They said he smelled like love to them and some of them, before he caught on and stopped wearing clothes, would stalk him until they could take from him an item of clothing he had worn or even had on at the moment. They put on his pilfered clothes to attract the others to themselves. Adam was an old man by then and often wondered if his semen had not changed for some diabolical reason. As it turned out, there were others like him on the various continents, something like one normal for every three million square miles, he calculated. They too had to be sequestered from the blacks. Adam was an old man, barely able to walk up and down the steps in his split-level town home and since electricity had become spotty, he often froze rather than put on clothes because the blacks would tear the clothes off of him with such ferocity, they nearly broke his bones.

When he died the next year, one of the black females, a tall strong woman by then, expertly removed his skin and wore it raw and fetid and became the first documented leader of The Blacks. The competition for resources forced more drastic measures among them and for that, they needed group identity and a leader, she told her people as she rallied them to compete for the resources they needed to survive.

The blacks were experts at everything they put their minds to and had already, just 40 years into their reign on Earth, reached nearby solar systems. But they had to go farther and faster, like an instinctual drive. They were especially efficient thinkers and doers because they never became ill and so did not spend any of their scientific energies studying themselves or on curing diseases. One tribe had even succeeded in cloning their gooey parents and siblings and so would never again face the near starvation their species faced in the first years of global ascendency. Now, they had an ready supply of goo-ies to eat, big herds of them, huddled all together in the gooey factory farms. This tribe soon had dominance on the land, while another tribe had in fact set out for the most distant galaxies.

The Cabral Discovery

Amil Cabral, named by his father after a West African political revolutionary, enjoyed running algorithms against big data sets from the narrow top-floor balcony of his Lisbon apartment, with its sunrise view of the São Jorge Castle and park. This solitary pursuit made him much much happier than talking or even thinking about politics. Or religion. Those were two conceptual categories that could not capture any of the nuanced data that revealed why people form the ideas that justify their actions; and since there is no controlled input, no measurement of how much God is in each influence—if any, how could one ever know which religious assertion was more true than another? Nevertheless, humans such as his father and brothers could not accept that his approach to understanding people, nature and their interactions did not warrant long heated arguments that dabbled in violence. And so, fuck ’em. Just because they couldn’t understand, let alone perform, hard-data science, that did not make his approach wrong. Why should the path to truth be as vapid as tossing around empty religious and political phrases? Amil Cabral stubbed his cigarette out. He raised his middle finger over the return key on his laptop. The sun cleared the trees of the little park around the castle, painting the wall and the back of his eyes red. “It isn’t,” he said to the sun. He lowered the finger onto the the key and pressed. The curser blinked on the last line of code, and the screen switched to an in-progress page. Somewhere in the Netherlands, an blackmarket quantum cloud computer logged the job and assigned runtime to it. In a few months, his current version of an algorithm that learns patterns of human behavior, society and Earth’s biosystems will have spent all of the cryptocurrency he stole from his father. His father’s money! he snorted looking over the red tiled roofs of old Lisbon. His father’s money actually had been pilfered by his grandfather when he fled his home country after the assassination of Amil’s namesake. So, Amil felt no guilt. He felt pleasure. He valued his life’s work far more than even his father’s life. He feared doing nothing far more than he feared the violence of his conservative family. He leaned into his shoulder against the white boiled-paint-and-rust railing and smoked. The screen on his laptop darkened, went black. He closed the lid.

An hour later, the banging started on his reinforced door, punctuated by demands. He put a bottle of wine and the laptop in his backpack, slung it. He dragged the sixteen-foot, two-by-twelve board to the balcony, swung it into place on the top of the building across a narrow walkway and made his escape.

Like a meat pop-up timer, Amil Cabral’s accurate model of Earth’s bio-future signaled to The Harvesters that Earth was almost done. So, The Harvesters began construction of the autonomous ships that in a million years would reach the third planet of a solar system in the barren, cold agricultural zones of rural Milky Way. The ten thousand ships were individually inexpensive, consisting mostly of sails, a small rudimentary autonomous control system for navigation and reaping and, when inflated, a moon-sized transportation bag. The nano-mesh bags kept the liquid part of the cargo from boiling off during transport, and so constituted the most expensive line item of the harvest operation. Although the operation’s expenses did add up to a medium-risk outlay of resources, the chances that the Cabral Discovery would deflect standard evolution was negligible. The equivalent of the Cabral Discovery surfaced on every productive planet, a nearly inevitable wave function collapse, a moment of random accurate perception occurred in every technological system. But not to worry. One out of a hundred thousand of those insights broke into the general cultural understanding; one out of a million planets on which the alarm was raised did something about it. Very good odds.

The Harvesters, imperfect as the universe itself, used to attempt to head off this moment of perspicacity. But when they had their own data insight, more than a billion years ago, they found they lost more harvests with intervention than were lost when they stayed out of it. They struggled through their own era of swallowing this ego-deflating bitter pill. That era of conservatism cost them several thousand harvests, but the worst part was that it concomitantly added several hundred billion new citizens, otherwise referred to as the Great Leap in Mouths to Feed. When they finally accepted a new hands-off approach, the number of failed harvests and new citizens dropped precipitously.

“I love you, Cabral,” said Cabral’s father. He poured another pitcher of water on the rag covering Cabral’s nose and mouth. The water splashed off his face on to the concrete floor of the prison cell. “Give me the encryption key. We’re going to lose everything! Just give it to me and I’ll stop the runtime and we can be a family again. Give me the key, and I won’t hand you over.”

When the coughing and choking subsided, Cabral caught his breath and cried out again, “I don’t have it! The algorithm generates its own key … randomly every split second. When it’s done, it will send the key to everyone on the planet at the same time. You’ll just have to wait like everyone else!”

“But Cabral!” yelled Cabral’s bothers. “You will seal our fate! They’ll come after all of us. We have families. You’ve ruined us all.”

Cabral’s father applied the electrodes to Cabral’s feet again. This time, Cabral died.

Cabral’s father prayed for his son’s soul. He called the Purity Computing Corporation.

“We are sorry for your loss,” the AI said in a sympathizing female tone. “When the brain removal kit arrives, please use the enclosed return packaging,” the AI said more mechanically.

Cabral’s family sold everything they had for cash, changed their names and returned to West Africa. 

Ten years later, Cabral's Discovery gained enough cultural status to trigger an aggressive global response. After the massacre, the victory was celebrated worldwide in a speech by the president of Mobile Operations Management:

"Those very dishonest people back there, the fake science, very dishonest. His brain was mush. We know this. They don’t know it. They would have said, he is exaggerating. These are very dishonest people. So you should be very proud of yourselves for what I’ve achieved. But I'll tell you, to keep this incredible momentum, I think maybe the most successful that the world has ever had. A thousand years of United Banking of Russia! So we've made this incredible progress together with your help, with the help of the millions and millions of people. We have triumphed over evil like nobody has seen before."

One million years later, ten thousand harvester ships surrounded the densely clouded Earth. The ships in stationary orbit each lowered a ten-inch-diameter, one-time hose through the thick, CO2 plus water-vapor atmosphere and assisted by the vacuum of space began to siphon off the thousand-yard-deep seething mass of insects that covered the Earth's surface.

Cabral’s Discovery, the ships sensors revealed, had been spot on!

“Whew!” exclaimed The Harvester monitoring the operation when the data arrived a thousand years later. “That was a close one!” He sipped on his protein drink, chewing the tasty insect legs with relief and delight.

The Carver

"The vandal who carved these four letters and three symbols L & M = 4vr into the tree's bark was male because a human male's love is so domineering and possessive that he wants the pain of doubt that the other will continue to reciprocate his love obliterated, put away for good. A female would have written L & M = [heart] because she expects her love to grow and become a stronger, more-powerful feeling within her and between them. And since the law clearly states that whatever mark a citizen puts into a tree, that same mark will be etched or burned into the citizen's skin, the jealous carver saw the threat of punishment more as motivation than deterrent. Consequently," explained the detective to his female partner, "the vandal's cavalier attitude toward the reality of physical suffering also means, beyond a doubt, that he came from that wealthy neighborhood there.” He pointed at the collection of houses crowding the border of the park. "And he is underage. He, the jealous vandal, wants his lover to see the mark whenever they go out together and so at least one of them is underage. So, now, let's go find a couple of love birds in their nest."

And they did, and it was true.

However, when all of this was explained to the judge of the local system, he became quite outraged over the twisted logic of the young male lover and so upped the ante and ruled that there be a public raffle and whoever's name was selected in the drawing, that name would be cut or branded into the vandal's skin. Thereby, they asserted, undermining all motives for vandalizing the few remaining trees in this sector. The judge explained to the news reporters that the most effective justice was participatory, and so the young man's neighbors and other residents of the sector are duty bound as citizens to submit their names to the raffle. The judge's superiors in the more abstract system thought this might be a stroke of genius and decided to let the situation play itself out.

Who knows, they reasoned, it could become a national model for correcting behavior of the young, who are nihilistic and self-centered in their despairing. They had tried compulsive military service, and that was not only too expensive but there were no longer enemies in the world like in the old days when countries would mass armies and run at each other in a glorious expenditure of vain and ignoble youth. These days the lethargy had set in so completely that no one believed or even really cared much when the system tried that old trick of declaring a hidden danger or a threat just across the border. People simply got on the internet and saw for themselves that no one was massing an army anywhere and ignored the call to action.

So, the judges were desperate to find some method for spurring the young into caring enough to expend their lives in the pursuit of glory.

At first, only the vandal's closest relative who had the shortest first name and same last name as him entered the drawing, which was, despite their relative wealth, expensive. The vandal, seeing a way out of his humiliation, asked his girlfriend, Lorraine, to submit her name as many times as his money, saved up over the years for a college education, could afford. He told her just as he flipped his flaxen hair out of his big eyes—the guards in their black caps had let him keep his hair long because he had such a pretty face and they hoped he would become something of a heartthrob and inspire more participation—that it would be true justice and a blow for love: The only thing the young had left in the world to care about. She agreed, declaring her love of love, and left the building with his bank account information.

At first, the judges wouldn't say who'd entered the drawing. They assumed they would get more entries if the citizens could keep their entrance into the drawing quite. They soon realized the incentive had missed the mark because they had so few entrants, and so they concluded that perhaps the justice of having your name carved in someone's back actually was a disincentive to entering the game. The judges were outraged at the shortsightedness of the citizens. So, they agreed to publish the names of all the entrants. They covered their spite by asking in a clever song: "What justice would it be if only his family name is to be drawn?"

The vandal for his part was shocked and hurt to find out that his girlfriend's name wasn't in the pool. He first thought that the system had pulled her name, but then he flashed on the intuitive realization that she had not entered the drawing! Each time he tried to convince himself that the system had pulled her name, he flashed on the realization that despite the fact that he had given her everything he had in the bank and had been saving for their wedding (and his going to college) to enter the drawing, she had not. He flared with jealousy, raising his fist, his chest ripped open by heart pain.

Once the reporters figured it out too, they pounced on the much more palatable scandal of the vandal as the jilted lover.

And he did feel jilted and hurt and jealous, so he outed her: He told the press her name, and she quickly became the international focal point of derision. Lorraine Nikonechnaya was the two-timing 19-year-old vixen who had abandoned true love for tawdry sex or at the very least taken advantage of a minor. A lot of sex tapes purported to be of her and her lover were released on the internet at the same time. She had to abandon all known addresses and slip off to another city under an alias. For a time, the news reporters followed up on each reported sighting of the short brunet with a full-figure, but either she was dead or she was very good at hiding, and so they gave up and went back to covering the latest string of murders.

Seeing that the news and popular perception of their object lesson in justice, citizen pride and ecological preservation was not going in the direction they had counted on, the judges decided they had better jump in with another rule change. So, they announced that they had put Lorraine Nikonechnaya's name on the list one million times. A citizen could save the vandal from the embarrassment of having his ex-lover's name cut into his back by buying back as many of her names as they could afford. After all, they said defensively and in fear of their jobs, the metro area alone was 17.3 million, and why should she get off scott-free? Also, his relatives were not allowed to buy any more entrees. Violation of this rule was declared a misdemeanor, which as everyone knew ruled out execution but not much else. 

Meanwhile the vandal's family had sued Lorraine and got most of his money back. Their "Young M," as their publicity agent advised them to call him, had been more industrious than most other young people in this day and age and had saved up the money from his business as the neighborhood IT expert. They had at first argued for leniency by pointing out that Young M had earned the money on his own, when most kids didn't bother, and had unfortunately committed the crime because he was driven by his love for the girl and so not responsible for his actions. But their attorney had to shift gears when the truth about Lorraine came out and declared the Young M had been manipulated by the vixen.

Since the money belonged to the vandal and he had the right to spend it on his own behalf, the family asked for volunteers to enter their names with the entry fee paid to replace as many Lorraines as they could. They ran out of the vandal's money long before they made a dent in the number. They had also hoped that the idea of entering as an act of charity would catch on, but it didn't. People seemed ambivalent about the cause because many of them, frankly, did not sympathize with the vandal. After all, he knew what he was doing and once you break the law, you have to take what's coming to you.

In his single live interview, the vandal, who had plenty of reason for despair, gave the audience just that. He begged the system to get on with it so he could get free to kill himself, which was not against the law but not the mea culpa the judges had been counting on. So, in a show of true democratic fervor the local system judges asked a higher panel of judges to decide if the punishment already meted out didn't suffice and whether continuing to incarcerate him, let alone mutilate him would violate the vandal's constitutional right to a punishment commensurate to the crime. 

The general consensus among the nine judges of the higher court was that should the lower court carry out its sentence to the Nth degree, the vandal would still be getting off easy. The tone of their ruling suggested that given that there were only a handful of trees left—tired and limp from a disease that decimated tree populations around the globe—they would consider only capital punishment as too harsh. The family tried to appeal to the Supreme Court, but the court wouldn't take the case nor comment on its merits. Just a "nope" in complex arcane language. The case was however famous enough to land on the System President’s desk. He flatly refused to pardon the vandal, because that would jeopardize the balance of power between the System Judicial and the System Administrative.  

In the end, the vandal landed right where he began: waiting for the lottery. There was nothing to live for and he was not only in emotional pain and embarrassment over the fact that his girlfriend (as had been thoroughly documented by the media) had been seeing another guy (and "with a lot more than just her eyes" as one clever commentator put it) for months before he had carved their initials into the tree with that now probably fateful summation of "4vr." His hair started to fall out in clumps.

Judging by the decreasing coverage of the whole affair in the media and the fact that no new names had been submitted to the lottery in days, Lorraine's name was destined to be carved into the vandal's back. So, the system decided it had better cut its loses and get on with it. It closed the lottery, set a date for the carving, which would be streamed live, and began rounding up sponsors for the airing of it. Keeping with the theme of environmental activism, the system announced that the carving would be done by a human and not a machine.

But like every decision made in this goddamn mess created by that half-wit judge who is now, thankfully, feeding the fish, as one system administrator bemoaned while pacing his office and talking to the video screened image of his counter part in another part of the system, that last decision has caused yet another quandary: If the carver made a mess of the job, what would that say and wouldn't that reinforce the sympathy some were expressing on behalf of the vandal. In the end, though, the president of the system decided after a ten-minute review of the situation that it was not necessary for the carver's name or anything else to be known, just like it was in the old days when executioners were anonymous.

Instead, the carver would be a featureless expert. Only the name of the winner would be necessary for the event. If the winner so chose, he or she could be present at the carving. That way no significance can be placed on the act of carving, only on the name of the winner and, of course, the statement that would be read to drive it all home:

"How would you like it if someone came by and just carved their initials or some message into your skin? Wouldn't that be an injustice worth pursuing and correcting? Your life now revolves around this vandalism. So, what would you want to do? Not as an act of revenge but as a deterrent to make sure everyone will know that such acts of selfishness will not be tolerated and that such vandalism left unanswered, especially against these last remnants of our once forested planet?" 

Within the first minute of finishing the speech, the president of the system got on the phone and had the speechwriter promoted to judge of the 812th spur, a position recently vacated by a judge prone to judicial activism. 

At 8 p.m. the tumbler cage stopped and the last piece of plastic paper shifted into place and the girl in the sequined bikini reached one long slender arm into the opening and drew out a strip. She held it in both hands in front of her ample breasts, feigning fear of whose name would be on it, as if it mattered. She read it to herself, widened her eyes, and switched it around to face the camera: "Lorraine Nikonechnaya." The girl smiled and posed. The image on the broadcast switched to the vandal who, apparently told he was on a world broadcast, began to make a gesture. The scene was cut to the courthouse exterior where the carving would take place.

The Carver, long black hair in a ponytail and rounded shoulders draped in a white surgeon's coat and with heavy blue latex gloves, sat on a round swivel stool with his hands together in front of his girth. His tools arranged on a silver stand on his right. The carving chair had been improvised from a mobile message chair and bolted to the floor. Restraining straps draped off the sides.

The vandal came in led by two black-clad police officers. He was shackled and cuffed. He wore a large blue hospital gown that opened in the back. No one else was in the room beside The Carver. He smiled at The Carver and raised his hand in acknowledgement of the other being in the room. He pushed his long blond hair out of his eyes, which were blue and cold. He looked remarkably handsome for a guy about to be cut upon, one commentator remarked. The only indication of stress were his flushed cheeks, but other than that he appeared rested as one who has been resigned to his fate for months.

The Carver met the vandal's eyes and winked with his right eye and nodded at the massage chair, facing toward the door he'd just come in. The police officers turned the vandal, coaxed him to straddle the seat and poked his face into the hole there in the headrest. His face pointed right at the big camera lens and his own face looking back at him from the curved surface of the polished lens.

The vandal hardly felt the first few letters, but then the burning set in and he could feel the blood running down his back. The flow seemed like too much to him and he moaned out the panicked command, "Not so deep." The belt strapping his head to the headrest kept him from moving much.

The Carver said, "Don't move" in a stern tone. “Contract said through the dermas and that's ... what ... we're ... doing."

The sting over his right shoulder blade told the vandal that the end of "Lorraine" had been reached and now would come the "Nikonechnaya." How could he possibly fit that on one line, the vandal wondered. So far, too, he thought, it is surprising how little it hurt, though the burning sensation and blood flow had increased. Then he heard a spraying sound behind him and a cool tingling sensation replaced the burning. Then came the first cut on his left shoulder above where the other letters had been cut. That startled him.

"What the hell? Are you putting her last name above her first?" He barely formed the words distinctly because of the padding holding his face in place.

"Come on, man, think," The Carver said. He spoke gruff, terse and serious. After all, this will be The Carver's life's work and he was approaching it with a judicious paternalism.

"Oh," said the vandal, "So the last name is the one you did first?"

"The first shall be last and the last shall be first," The Carver said and patted the vandal on the shoulder.

"You know I loved her."

"So I've heard."

It was difficult to talk with his chin jammed up, but he felt an impulse to put the defining words on this monumental experience in his life. He wanted to say a phrase that he could think back on that deflects the humiliation and overshadows all the inane babble of the media and the system administrators all trying to package the vandalism, love story and carving into a small contained box to be put away forever and ignored, just like what was happening day in and day out to the rest of humanity—its brains and passions sucked out and splayed on the ground like dirty water from a paper cup. But the only words he could manufacture around the feeling deep in his brain related to how he felt about all of it was "But I don't love her anymore."

"Wise move."

Encouraged, he continued, "Our first date was in the park. This was before the trees all died ... "

The carver put pressure on the back of his neck with two fingers, shutting off the vandal's ability to speak.

"Careful now. I don't want to miss a letter and have to add it in somehow. Could get messy and we want it to look good for the display."

The vandal's sensory system had become attuned to the light cutting motion and the release each motion brought to his back, like the release of cool air from his spine. He envisioned a silver liquid oozing out and revealing to the world his special superhuman nature, the uniqueness of his inner self, the beauty of the feelings he carried around inside himself like a divine fluid.

"I thought she was my soul mate, and we'd found each other ..."

He felt a tug at the back of his neck and heard a loud ripping sound and then his mind cleared, like a fog had lifted or a rain had cleared the air. He heard a door close gently, pulled to its latch, and the light dimmed and he realized how bright it had been. For the cameras, he thought. They are so startled by what they've seen—by the silver fluid of my essence and my calm that they've gone to regroup and figure out what to do. The nation, he thought, the world is looking on in wonderment.

And indeed, for another generation they looked upon the preserved and framed patch of carved skin hanging next to the last dying tree in the world repeated in wonderment: “Lorraine Nikonechnaya,” they said aloud. “Lorraine Nikonechnaya.”

Final Dispatch from the Blue Moon

“So what happened?” I asked him and took a drink from the gin and tonic on the table between us. I sat the glass of sucked-dry ice on the heavy wood top in the farthest back booth and poised the pen over the notepad. “This time just the stuff I asked you about and then you get a drink.” I’d finally gotten him settled down and focused on the Dick Hugo Incident. I mean, the old guy’s hair was nearly all torn out and his face bruised. But, boy, when some people find out you’re a reporter they go on and on about how much your paper sucks. About it being a lapdog to the galactic corporate interests and on and on. “After you tell me what happened, from the beginning, I do the rest. All you gotta do is tell me what happened and I do the rest.”

“They’re watching.” The old guy lifted a gnarled finger branch like it was a whisper and pointed it at the bar.

I turned toward the bar and put my arms out. Nobody was even looking. The place was dead; and the bartender, the man bartender, was watching the soccer game. I looked back at him and rolled my eyes.

“Hell man they told me about it first. They want you to tell your story. Everybody wants you to tell your story.”

“Okay, man. I took ol’ Dick Hugo out for a walk. That’s it. I had him stay a couple nights at my place hanging out against the wall at the end of my bed, laying on the sofa. That’s it. I read poetry to him to calm his nerves.”

“Why?”

“He looked tired, bored really, just hanging around in that booth out front lying to kids about their future. I perked him up. When the holiday was over, he looked a little less like he’d been painted in gravy. ‘You need some color,’ I told him. When they came and got him, they roughed me up a bit, smacked me around with open hands. They’re good guys; they don’t like to hurt nobody unless they have to. In fact, after they told me how upset that long-legged bartender was who’d been working the night I took him, I was glad they’d hit me a couple a times. Hell, I felt like hitting myself a couple a times. Besides, Hugo said tans and browns were sophisticated colors for telling lies, a gentle palate for a gentle soul which he really is. Too much noise and flash and the lies fly away like finches from a bush. I said okay and stopped and asked did he remember that time I was sitting there, must have been ’74 or ’75, and this guy comes in with a spider monkey with six arms and he has the monkey standing on the bar there in front of a plastic doll laying on its back and every time he took a shot that monkey would squeak and hop on top of that doll, wrap it up in all six arms and pump on that doll about two or three good licks then sit up on its stomach, two little hands up around its mouth, working, four little hands out and waiting to be slipped a cracker to two.”

The long-legged bartender had said she learned to give head from watching Zenoists when she was a teenybopper on the planet Karl Marx. A thing like that tells you a lot about a woman, I said to her. She smiled, thinking. Of what, my heart stuttered to wonder. But I knew. I knew.

*

The owner of the Blue Moon sat down at the table, sliding in where the liar had been sitting when the truth came out, and told me, “You know there’s something crazy happens in here every night. Last night, a woman came in and wanted to buy one of my Cash Only signs.” He pointed it out: a picture of the Man In Black, face pointed down like he was disappointed at the world for making him such a big fucking deal even out here at the edge of the galaxy but still looking forward to what would happen next. “She said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to buy one. How much?’ It’s just a piece of white copy paper with the poor quality black and white picture and the word ‘Cash’ on the top of the picture and the word ‘Only’ on the bottom of the picture. I said, ‘Okay. Twenty bucks.’ She said, ‘Would you take a credit card?’”

Then Elvis came in and straddled a bar stool then unstraddled it and pushed it aside and the bartender put a can of Bud down in front of him and stepped back, like it was an experiment. Elvis took a big swig and as he set the can back down, he threw back his pompadour and raised his eyelids, eye whites gleaming and smiled—with his face, it was hilarious. Just looking at him made you laugh.

*

I mean her arms, man, the bartender’s arms, she could reach across the table and put your eyes out. I didn’t have to not look at her chest, which I’m sure was fine; I had to not look at her long white arms and veined shoulders because the Matrix, with its network running, was sitting there not looking at the woman next to me, whom I vaguely remembered had given me a blowjob in a booth back before we knew the Truth, the same booth, because I said I’d put her in the story I was working on. In fact, my balls were still wet, which was how the whole issue of blowjobs and Zenoists had come up in the first place. In fact, I felt shy while they were singing Once in the Blue Moon because of post-orgasm incertitude.

More specifically, the Matrix was busy not looking at the groupie’s mouth, which was fleshy and red and full and creased like an orangutan’s ass. It looked like a beautiful mouth to fuck. In fact, it was all you thought about when you were looking or not looking at it.

So we did that for awhile, not looking at each other’s female partners. I mean I could have looked at his girl’s arms with pleasure but that would have broken the rules so I followed the rules and watched her animated face—stunning blue eyes and hair all over—while not looking at her arms, but also not hearing her say, “I learned to give head from watching Zenoists on Karl Marx.” But since I’d get in trouble for writing truths, you are right now not reading that part.

I went back to trying to find out if what Dick Hugo’s captor was saying was true. Had he been smacked around? Had he been hunted down by Karl Marx goons and beaten and forced to apologize in front of Dick Hugo—on his knees? (That part was made up. I was just trying to trick them into saying more than they wanted by denying the obvious lie). None of the bartenders knew anything, I’d lied to the old man, but they gave me some beam numbers to try, supposed to be the beam numbers of a couple guys who would know what did and didn’t happen with Dick Hugo. I took out my beamer and wandered to a shaded area. The numbers where fake; I tried them. I let it go. I didn’t want to jeopardize my drinking relationships. After all, we’d all end up somewhere.

Then the owner came over and said he’d heard the question, said the bar was wiretapped, bugged, because he was making a novel out of every thing said in the bar—just a long novel unbroken by paragraphs or punctuation. He said it was a Communist Novel. Was this the Zenoist who launched the blowjob artist? I let it go. Only so many times a reporter can ask about blowjobs before it becomes an act of jealousy.

“Fine, I’ll take two copies, but what about the accusation? What did Dick Hugo tell the drunk?”

“They’re all false.” He looked like a movie star from the ’40s. An old weathered cowboy with long waving black and gray hair, lots of wrinkles in all the right patterns and directions like his face had been baked in cocktail sauce.

“It’s all lies,” he said, “but two things.”

*

Here they are: Dick Hugo had been stolen and then returned three days later, like Jesus was taken by God and then returned to us forever three days later. That was one true thing. Dick Hugo had been wrapped in brown paper; and “The Shroud,” they were calling it, was hanging in the back in a temperature controlled glass case to keep the moisture levels just right.

“You can see your face in it, if you look at it long enough.” The owner spread his fingers like radars pulling in the mystery. “It’s a Communist Shroud. It’s Our Shroud.”

That was true, he said, and so was the part about the thief being forced on his motherfucking knees to beg forgiveness of the Great Poet, the Famous Poet of the Working Man.

“But how can that part be true and not the rest?” I interjected, professionally. “Who made him get on his knees? What about the bruises? Why should the powerful (in this case a Communist moon owner) and the Downtrodden (in this case a drunk who would fuck his own mother for a shot), why should the powerful be protected by anonymity when the poor always get their fucking names in the paper? I can’t just write that the Dick Hugo was stolen and then returned and someone prayed for forgiveness and that’s that! I mean think of all the other stuff we could say—like the part about how Hugo wrote, ‘You might come here Sunday on a Simulator. Say your dimension broke down.’”

“Dimensions only exist in stories.”

“What about the open-handed slaps. That’s fucking gothic, man. That’s the fucking story, man!”

He said, “Write what you want. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“That’s what they all say!”

I flipped my notebook shut and looked around the bar a couple of times, like, hey motherfucker, I might just walk around in here and talk to ANYBODY! I’m the fucking press, man! That’s when I saw the man with the spider monkey hanging off his right arm, holding a plastic doll. The fucker had my date, too. I scooted the bar stool back to leap up and get her back but stumbled a step. When I looked up, there stood Dick Hugo and I’ll be fucked if he didn’t have ketchup on his cheeks; then I saw movement: The drunk kidnapper pushed along by a big hulking man in a black suit just as they entered the doorway to the bathroom. The Hugo Thief looked back at me with the black eyes of a dead man; and the barmaid with the long arms started clapping right in my ear from ten feet away; and I saw a bright but strangely soft light coming from the back room; and then Johnny Cash came on the jukebox—Folsom Equinox Blues—and then two big men, giant meaty fuckers, grabbed an arm each and lifted me off my feet; they both moved like that most famous Zenoist, Brezhnev. I squirreled my eyes around, but all I could see of them were wet milky whites behind the sharp edges of the holes punch in the porcelain masks for eyes just as they shot me into the night.

Just before I hit the sidewalk at the feet of Dick Hugo, my ears ringing from the blast, I understood the story. Finally, as I saw my face laughing back at me from within Dick Hugo’s Coin-Operated Truth Dispenser. A drunk had been given the truth for a random coin: It’s all lies! We’re all lies! And the Zenoists will stop at nothing, but not for anything, to keep Dick Hugo from getting off the Blue Moon. When I found my head, I twisted it into place and went back inside for more … or less.

DISRUPTORS

I

Deplaning onto the tarmac at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport, Marsel Rose Martin looked back at the bizarre apparitions that airplanes had become and marveled at the tiny propellor attached to the rear of the blimp-sized airplane she’d just arrived on. Who knew aerospace engineers were such cards! Most Sims still traveled in conceptually conventional means since flying unaided was cold, abrasive and difficult. You really had to concentrate to stay airborne, as in dreams, and running into things still hurt like hell. Some people tried to just appear places, but you have to know a lot about the place you want to get to and reappearing inside another person or wall or moving vehicle was painful and confusing until the Simulation Construct got you all sorted out. So, Marsel still enjoyed flying in a plane, such as they were: You get in one and its automation zooms you to your destination really really fast. In fact, it took longer to get on and off the plane then to fly the distance from Seattle to Shanghai.

From the tarmac, Marsel joined the other Sims heading for a wall of Personal Transportation Crafts fifty stories high. The PTC she had ordered identified her, popped out of the wall some hundreds of yards up and swooped down on her in the loading zone. The rounded clear lid slid back and she slipped in next to Robert Henderson, a journalist who’d transitioned early on from Real Seattle’s Daily-Rocket to its version in The Simulation. The PTC lifted off, just fast enough to give her a sinking feeling, and carried them higher than the highest skyscraper. Marsel said the name of a restaurant in Cantonese, to show cultural respect to the simulated AI running the craft. The PTC veered right and drew them over the densely packed high-rises.

“Hope you like sushi,” Marsel said.

“Knowing you, a sushi restaurant in Shanghai is going to be the least of it.” Robert looked at her sideways and held his eyes on her—long red hair, sharp chin, blue eyes—prodding her for some insight into why she invited him out. He met Marsel and her husband, Perran, in Real Seattle during the transition from the deadly Real Earth to The Simulation. Oxygen-dead oceans grew bacteria belching hydrogen sulfide at a truly remarkable volume and rate that proved more challenging to human life than widespread crop failures and decades-long scorching heat waves—even the rich were dying. Robert had profiled Marsel and Perran, short black hair, dark grey eyes, for the Daily-Post, portraying them as roguish intelligencers who traveled the world running counter-terrorism operations to protect the creation of The Simulation, humankind’s last redoubt against extinction. Now living in The Simulation, they run intelligence operations against Sim clans attempting to take control of power sources. The infrastructure of the computing facilities, while dispersed around the globe in deep underground bunkers, used geothermal and thermal nuclear heat exchangers to power the simulators (combined with geo-heatsinks spread over thousands of square miles for cooling). Impervious to any of the few remaining bio-clans on the surface—raw survival consuming the vast majority of their lives—the one weakness were the robotic maintainers, operated by semi-autonomous AIs. Gain control of these at one energy input site or another, and you had some real power over your fellow Sims.

Marsel, however, held her tongue. She understood Robert. His interest could be held with mystery much more than with information.

The PTC suddenly descended, giving her a sensation of stomach drop, between very narrow, very tall buildings with massive light panels fading between vibrant versions of a neon color wheel. The panels filled the wet, night air with sharp blues, greens, yellows. The craft swung to a ledge halfway up one of the light-panel buildings and hovered. The glass front of the bubble slid over them, and Marsel led Robert toward a rectangular black hole in the misty color panel.

Just inside, a very large room opened up. They waited to be seated. The restaurant was huge, but Robert couldn’t tell just how huge the room was or how far it went back, because of the patchwork of very tall bamboo forests throughout the space. From what he could see, people stood at sushi bars where there were no stools, tables or chairs. He figured the operators didn’t want people hanging around forever, so they didn’t have or allow seating. He could just see, through a cloud of bamboo leaves, naked young men and women, completely hairless, walking back and forth across the top of the bar. They passes each other on the narrow bar with grace and occasionally squatted …

“Right this way, please,” interrupted a woman in a very thin red kimono. He figured her for Chinese but had not spent that much time in the Orient. So, he chastised himself for being racist. In the Sim, whatever her genetic heritage, it meant just however much she wanted it to. She led the way. Without looking back, she admonished them about Europeans creating their own chairs and he got over it. “Here you are,” she waved her hand at a spot between two whites dressed as cliche ideas of Native Americans and a large black man in a white suit. They’d have to squeeze in, the place was that popular. “Tell our master chefs,” she lifted her hand to signal the naked man and woman standing above them, “what you would like.” She spun and shuffled away.

Robert looked up at a narrow penis and balls set, slid his eyes to the flowering vagina and then at Marsel. “Uh …”

“You haven’t seen anything yet.” She tucked her head and laughed politely. Looking up, she said, “I’ll have a hot sake, a dragon roll and an assortment of sashimi. Josh?”

“No menu?”

The two chefs stared down at him placidly.

“No. Just think of some sushi you’ve had before and I guarantee you it will be the best food you’ve ever had.”

Just then the naked woman stepped to his left, squatted and peed steaming brown liquid into a tea cup held out by one of the cultural appropriations. She straightened and stepped right and continued staring down at him without expectation or any sense of acknowledging his sentience. The faux-Indian sipped at the cup.

“The fuck?” She’s got a hell of a good aim, though, he thought.

“Just order already! I’m starving.” Marcel waved at their master chefs.

“Uh, okay. A California roll, sashimi and uh well don’t supposed you have a chilled sake?”

The man produced a white wine glass, held it in front of his hips and let loose a stream of liquid out of his penis. When it hit the right level, he stopped, knelt and set the glass down. Meanwhile, the female chef pushed her hips forward and filled a sake decanter with steaming fluid. Then the man turned around, squatted and began pooping a sushi roll; the woman, still squatting, began letting sashimi fall onto pads of rice from her …

“This is too much. I can’t eat that.” Robert’s laugh carried and several other customers laughed and pointed their chopsticks at him. “You’ve gone too far.”

The man stood, spun and quickly cut up the sushi rolls with the long fingernail on his left index finger.

“Oh stop it.” Marsel picked up a sashimi pad and put it in her mouth. “You’re just not going to believe it,” she said with her mouth full. She chewed and mmmm’ed.

“You do have the weirdest taste in dinning experiences.” He fingered a segment of California roll and popped it into his mouth. The flavor exploded. The his eyes watered from the perfectly timed release of the most amazing wasabi he’d ever eaten. “Yeah, wow. Okay.”

They ate and drank like starving people, paying the service no mind. At one point, Josh blushed after he noticed his own loud moaning.

Recovering from their first round of gastronomic ecstasy, Robert returned attention to Marsel. “Well?”

Marsel swallowed. “I’ve lost Perran.”

“Interesting choice of verbs, but then Perran is prone to forgetting where his home is.” He drained off the wine and held up the glass. The male chef filled it.

“It is true. But according to one of my contacts in The Twins’ organization, he might have dilly dallied his dick right into a hornets nest.”

“Ouch.” Robert laughed. In a simulated world of pleasure and pain but no death, how much trouble could Perran really be in? After spending months on the road with these two, he knew better than to be alarmed by Perran’s absences. But then so did Marsel. So, something else was going on. He gathered together a more serious look. “What kind of trouble?”

“It started out the usual kind, but now they have him and about a hundred other men contributing more and more of their energy into some kind of dark-sim project.”

“Perran knows what he’s doing, don’t you think? He’s probably just making sure the project can’t endanger the power source.”

“I’d like to find him to be sure.” She took a shot of saki and filled the little cup from the narrow neck of the decanter.

“And you think it’s time he came home?”

“I’m not sure what home is in here, but at the very least I’d like to know what he knows. The latest system updates are said to secure the power from the inside, but The Twins could be trying to work with someone on the outside to gain control of the protectors.”

“Why, I wonder? Even if they could control some of the power, they would eventually be put to sleep by the AI.” Robert worked Marsel as much as she worked him. That’s how information leaks: it never flows just one way. Like a bolt carries information about the nut that fits it, Marsel’s paranoias gave him some indication what else she was learning from her other spies. No one asked a journalist for help altruistically. They always want to use the journalist as a battering ram against their enemies or ignorance and often both.

“I assume The Twins are still trying to hijack the singularity to match wits with the universal mind or some other mystical nonsense. Like …” she raised her saki decanter and tipped it at the female host for a refill. The host shot the steaming wine into the narrow opening from a standing position, hips slightly forward. “Thank you.” The female receded but did not respond. “Like maybe the singularity is an artifact of an alien mind, and we’re actually experiencing an alien invasion.”

“Oh, that still?” Robert had spent plenty of time interviewing The Twins—two of the Sim’s original architects—about their conspiracy theory. It made for a borderline sensationalist story, but they never really delivered the goods as far as evidence. A lot of subjective logic making. “Did your source mention anything about information pumping though a wormhole?”

Marsel motioned curious surprise with her head: “No she did not.”

“For that matter,” he downed his drink and motioned for a refill, “they could be the aliens trying to call home and give the green light to invasion. I mean, look at this!” He motioned up at the naked, hairless male pissing in his glass. “We have no fucking idea what’s going on!” His voice tripped upon shrill and then balanced out. “I’m thinking simulating is a worse deal than staying planet side.” He put the glass to his nose and peered into the liquid. He was becoming remarkably intoxicated.

“You do know what’s happening planet-side though right? The Bio-holdouts are dying of asphyxiation, cold, thirst. They are dying of hunger and predation by human Toughs and animals also looking to survive. They are being killed or just keeling over faster than we can count them. It’s a rock-solid shit show out there.”

“It always surprises me to hear you cuss! You’re such a clean-cut a spy. Yin to Perran’s Yang and all that.” The hostess pushed two more people into the tight space along the sushi bar just behind Robert. The one touching him was a comically large woman. She weighed on him and coated his jacket with the gray powder falling out of her bouffant hair.

“Oh, hey. Check this out.” Robert pushed against the big woman at his back. His face became pinkish-red, splotchy and then settled down into an old white man’s alcohol-ravaged face. “I can do many colors. Here’s bluish.”

“Gross.”

“Yeah, well.” He put his face back to its long mid-thirties African American, Real-Earth version. Her strange response told him how drunk he was. “You get the point. I better get out of here.” He released his resistance to the big woman at his back. The space between him and Marsel closed. He looked into her eyes with a fleeting affection.

“I can make you sober, lots of practice with Perran.”

“No.” He popped himself out from between the two. “No thanks. I like it.” He reached back in, acquired his glass just as the tectonic plates pushed together. He swilled the last of his wine and flicked the glass onto the bar. “I guess we just walk out of here?”

Marsel followed him toward the front doorway. The maitre d’ had changed into a tank-top that accentuated her nipples and revealed side-boob. She stepped in front of them.

“Do y’all want to make an energy donation? Priority seating for ten minute’s concentration on our menu next time you come in.” She motioned to a room where dozens of people, that he could see, reclined in barcaloungers, eyes shut.

“What if we never want to come back?” Robert slurred at her, getting more drunk the closer he got to the door. “What kind of voodoo horse shit …”

“You would be a rarity. One we can live without.”

But before he could answer her eyes and words, Marsel had his arm in a firm grip and pulled him through the door into the color besmirched night, whereupon he sobered.

“Cheap trick,” he said. “See if I ever come back here more than twenty or thirty times!” He yelled.

“We’ve devolved to an economy of social status in a place where no one really needs anything.” She looked up, and one of the million PTCs above began descending out of the crowded sky. “Sober?”

“Yeah, suddenly. Not sure I appreciate it though.” Whenever the crazy-ass Twins—with whom he had plenty of … um… personal experience,—came up in conversation he desired strong drink.

They climbed in the front of the vehicle. Robert thought hard about being drunk again. Just seemed like the right thing to do before going heading into whatever psychotic sex-gestalt Perran had lost himself in.

“The point here, then, is that you want me to help you find Perran? The Twins?” He slurred.

“You’re drunk again.”

“Intentionally.” That came out with difficulty. “Just get me to the airport.”

“Such a clean-cut boy. When you decide to sober up, yeah, I’d like to rescue my husband from his assignment.”

II

The Twins, an appellation accepted and adopted by the two women although they were not sisters, walked blond and naked, side-by-side into the bright white concept of a bio-tech clean room lit by smoking neon lights that dripped down the white walls in red, blue and green. Identical saucer-sized pink nipples atop fat mirror-image breasts jiggled; milk-white skin shimmered; symbols of two halves of a broken heart shaved into died black pubic hair. In barefoot strides, hips swaying, they smiled at their target who was reclined in an armless leather chair: Perran. The hum of the neon ballasts grew louder as they approached Perran from each side. Mirror-identical thin noses, thick pink lips, they came at him with pornographic intention written clearly in their eyes. They licked teeth in unison. Perran squirmed against padded restrains clamped to his ankles and wrists. He had had as many and as varied sexual experiences as he could and time with The Twins had been at the top of his wish list since he’d heard of their cult-like sexual activity. He understood the price would be his downtime in the Simulation, but what was a little clock-time of hijacked attention when … The Twins kneeled before him, red hot and swollen, skin slick with perspiration and oil and took him into their hands, caressing … when he will experience his own pleasure, echoing though his experience of their individual pleasure and shared … the chair adjusted to push his head up and his hearth thumped … They opened his mind into the one they shared. He entered. In the bio-feedback loop of their Ménage à Trois collective consciousness, they attained a growing climax state what would last and increase to an empty sate of pure wet lust until they let him go. After all his experiments, after all the male and female body forms he’d explored during extended intercourse, The Twins offered one extra, one glimmer he could not get anywhere else, an experience of sexual oneness with multiple people, a whole-mind oneness, oblivion in a field of ecstasy.

The Twins twitched and the neon lights exploded into smoke.

As Perran lost himself, as the dozen copies of each of The Twins stepped out of recesses hidden behind sliding sections in the walls, animated by Perran’s intensifying focus, the single entity of The Twins flashed its consciousness into the darkness, the incomprehensible space between their universe and the construct creating it, the singularity’s mind. They have not yet received any direct answer, no unequivocal message from the vast consciousness, the panpsychic mind of universal being or … but they keep trying with no lack of willing male-oriented Sims from whom they drew power. 

III

“What does a ride in a 1969 Impala convertible down Rainier Avenue in SimSeattle feel like? Rolling through a neighborhood formerly and euphemistically called diverse by those unwilling and subconsciously averse to acknowledging the de-facto racist precepts, the white-privilege fear that made and kept the neighborhood nearly entirely Black suddenly feels like justice has descended on the morning dew. The economic, neighborhood-by-neighborhood prison system lifted, the creativity and social power that system tried to knock down and keep down, to crush under its jackboots, has sprung into full bloom. Its a marvelous orgy of form, structure, sound and color. Idling along with the chorus of thundering, big-bass beauties, down the narrow, once-dangerous Rainier Avenue in Seattle, the big steering wheel light under my fingers, passed a shifting, roiling cityscape, its run of four-story brick buildings and once-dilapidated housing reformed by the creativity of people who even while viciously repressed dominated the orphaned white culture of the Real World. The joy of freedom long held out of reach was palpable. Literary Magical Realism has sprung to life in the valley …”

Thus began Robert’s old-school, long-form essay in The Replicant Express, one of the first of his stories syndicated on thousands of loosely associated publishing platforms in The Simulation. The stories were cover for his search for a source he could follow to wherever in the simulation The Twins held Perran, missing for months now. Despite his flippancy, he knew first hand just how fucked up The Twins could make a person, and he liked Marsel. Plus, if The Twins were fucking around with the construct running The Simulation, that would be an important story. Journalism mattered as much in The Simulation as it did in the world that came before it.

“… like all neighborhoods and cities replicated in the simulation, the Rainier Valley initially convulsed with many new arrivals living out old fears, anger and aggression. Drivers careened into each other. Pedestrians got mowed down. Gangs and the loosely associated attacked each other out of economic panic. But once people realized the economy of the simulated universe functions around quality, interest, talent and effort instead of buying shit with money, as soon we could all see the bottom and it wasn’t that far down, soon as we saw that nothing was left out of all the richness of making, having and sharing then the violence stopped (except for sport). Now even the sky over this valley radiates with a vibrancy once associated with vacation beaches set aside for the rich. This Red ’69, for example, was built/created by Disruption Auto, a group my friend from the bad old days of the war on drugs, a lawyer and marijuana entrepreneur, introduced me to. The mechanics and engineer artists create and print car parts in replicated 3D printers. The parts are so exact and perfect to the originals on Real Earth that you have to be very high on their list of cool people to get one …”

Robert’s stories became so widely popular in part because of the writing, as he would insist if asked, but mostly because he figured out how to travel to places he had not been. From his experience of traveling to war-torn hotspots or poverty-stricken, climate-ravaged foreign lands on Real Earth, he remembered the key fixture for any journalist working in a foreign place: The Fixer. A local who could speak the language of the reporter and had good connections within the government and neighborhoods in whatever country or scene the reporter wanted to work. In the New World, individuals could not find their way to places they had not been in their Earth Lives because they could only go wherever their experiences could take them. Robert, however, realized he could follow a person to a place he had never been. Once he had that insight, he began interviewing people about their lives on Real Earth and once he found people from places he had never been to, he would ask them to take him along when they traveled there again. So, Robert’s writing became very popular as he gave accounts of cities, neighborhoods, towns, villas and villages in the simulation unknown to outsiders.

From Barcelona, he wrote about the indecently minded rebels mixing with kinetic artists and European sophisticates to create a city pushed to the extreme limits of architectural energy on par with the grandest conceptions of Antoni Gaudí. In this city’s gothic, narrow alleyways, sword fighting had become the apex of personal exploration, freedom in expression and the bravado of bullfighting. Women were the most fierce and feared of the sword fighters. Knowing they can’t actually kill, they duel to the extremes of pain. They strike and strike and strike with a fury born of eons of pampering the egos of men.

Not all changes were in the form of physical constructs. In a Berlin neighborhood, for instance, Robert found a circus-like atmosphere focused on the delivery of mail, old-fashion letters and postcards. The mail carriers, launched by catapults, parachuted to front doors and hand delivered these parcels.

Some were "blasted" into the sky for a calculated distance and height and then floated down to a front door hanging from parachutes of bright colors. They were visible in the sky from everywhere in the city as they came down over a neighborhood, and everyone hoped to their front door. They made a grand arrival and a formal display of delivering a single piece of mail.

“In this city, people love to write and send letters,” Robert wrote. “In fact, the sky over one's neighborhood can be dotted with thousands of brightly colored parachutes at a time popping open like time-elapsed flowers.”

The apex of his journeys so far, he told a graduation class at the Universal University of Unity, where he had tracked a devotee of panpsychism, “was just last week when I landed an invitation to a warehouse dance party in New York City. I haven’t written the story yet, so you are the first to hear it. I wanted an invitation, hard to get because you hav to pass a battery of psych and concentration tests, the reason for which will become clear as I tell this short story. I had heard rumors that a collective of mathematicians and physicists had pushed the limits of our collective construct, this simulation, by applying their calculations of mirror symmetry in Calabi–Yau manifolds … yeah, the stuff you’ve been learning. Anyway, they found that with enough people concentrating on the correct vibrational frequency they could collapse simulated distances. So, I passed my exams. Thank you! And got invited! The scene was just like people of my generation experienced on Real Earth: A large, high-ceilinged warehouse filled with laser lights, disco balls, multiple bands and DJs, bounding bodies, waving arms, with wide-spread audience participation. Breaking through the cacophony was a wave of human habitation harmony. Like nothing I’d experienced before. My favorite musical moment was a retro montage of instruments that sounded like the B52s having sex with DK on acid at Led Zeppelin’s house, riffing off a score written by The Stranglers. Then the real magic kicked in: The two urban branes of LA and New York approached. From my perspective in New York, LA looked like a two-dimensional, vibrating pane of glass, edges unseen, rushing at us from across liquid space, everything vibrating. We collided with a deafening bong, like hitting a massive sheet of steel with a rubber mallet. In the ensuing mayhem, as the two manifolds of curved space-time collided, I saw a human horde at the area of impact melt into a writhing mass of what looked like … well, lime jello infused with lightening. I wasn’t in the middle of it, but I can tell you the feeling I got from it was was really quite ... beautiful. Remarkable. A really great high.”

The subject of his search came to him after this lecture, eager to learn more about the confluence of minds that happened when the branes collided.

IV

As she approached the shimmering glass dome, hundreds of feet tall at its center and surrounded by a wide field of granite blocks, Marsel constructed two six-feet long harpoons, tips infested with reverse spikes, inches long. She carried one in each hand. Dressed in a workman’s blue single-piece jumpsuit and black high heels, Marsel signaled to The Twins that while she was dressed for a blood bath, she also didn’t expect too rigorous of a challenge from them. The Twins had used their energy slaves, which now included Perran, to build the dome and labyrinth of marble blocks surrounding it. The stones of the labyrinth shifted and smashed together in great throngs of concussion. But Marsel kept a step ahead of everything going on around her. Her ease of passage was also due to the edifice being run by slave concentration. Some of those slaves had allowed themselves to be enslaved like Perran (male and sex addicted), but some had been captured and plugged in by trickery.

Marsel pressed her hand against the cold stone. With a slight increase in pressure, the stones slid in and fell to the ground. She hopped inside, while drawing back her right arm and leveling the harpoon. Her plan was simple: Harpoon The Twins to something, grab Perran and run. As she cleared the fallen blocks of granite, she saw The Twins standing naked and stunned by the intrusion in front of a large lecture-hall blackboard. Marsel threw the harpoon at The Twin on her right, noticing as she aimed for the naked chest that both women had given themselves matching, massive mounds of pubic hair that covered inner thighs down to knees and over abdomens up to their chests. The harpoon caught The Twin square in the chest, carried her off her feet, stabbing her against the blackboard several feet off the lecture stage surface. Marsel threw the harpoon in her other hand, but The Twin on the left had time to assess the situation and dodge the missile. Before Marsel could throw a third harpoon, The Twin remaining free scrambled through a door, stage left at the edge of the blackboard, The Twin pinned to the blackboard screaming in a pain-rage.

Marsel jumped to the front of the stage and hunted for Perran among the hundred or so slaves stacked in auditorium seating. They sat in various stages of collapse. Far more men than women had been ensnared, and with their heads down on the desktop or lolled off to one side or other, Marsel had a difficult time locating Perran. Then she recognized him, seated at the middle of the top row. She got to Perran and lifted him out of his seat, threw him over her shoulder and took off down the aisle in long strides. The Twin still on her feet burst out of the door she’d disappeared behind. Half polar bear (top half) and half vagina with legs, she hit Marsel and Perran broadside. Perran flew into the second row of seats, and Marsel slammed against the railing of the first row. The Twin set upon Marsel and began mauling her with claws and teeth. She cut, pulled and crushed mercilessly. Her strength and speed could only come from a power source more than the typical Sim allotment. Marsel deflected sixty percent of the blows, bites and scratches. With no warning or preamble of any kind one of her wildly barbed spear heads appeared out of The Twin’s chest. Hoisted above her, The Twin screamed and pawed and then flew several feet. Standing over Marsel, Robert reached down a hand.

“Pin her!” Marsel said. And the two of them drove the spear point into the floor of the lecture hall.

“She’s powered by something,” Marsel said, her wounds slowly healing.

“She’s powered by them,” Robert said signaling the slaves. “It’s why they have lost their minds. With the power these slaves’ concentration give her comes also fragments of their subconscious.”

“Splintering minds.”

“Hers and theirs.”

They looked at Perran, who while coming awake reeled like a drunkard.

“Let’s get him out of here,” Marsel said. She tried to steady Perran as Robert joined her. “The Twins have invented a new game. Looks like evolution and the will to power that fuels it works even in here. We’ve got some adapting to do.”

“The disruption just beginning,” Perran groaned. “They have found their access to the construct.”

“A new terrible era has come to life in paradise.” Robert said.

About the author:

Jake Berry Ellison Jr. has been an award-winning journalist for 30 years in the Pacific Northwest (primarily at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer but including SFGate.com, Houston Chronicle, Esquire and elsewhere) covering science, marijuana, higher education, crashes, protests, shootings and many other forms of mayhem. Currently he lives in Missoula, Mont., where he earned an MFA in creative writing and is currently writing a science fiction trilogy.