Forbidden Thoughts Page 3

  The suit did tell her she had nothing to fear, though it really had no basis for this statement. It just felt it was for the best, given Tanya’s impending radiation sickness and subsequent cancers. It also turned off the clock because its accurate reading had somehow triggered her, according to her vitals. So it just disconnected that bit of unhelpful truth.

  The first set of aliens who found her, wandering the rusty red shallows of the river basin, took her captive though she was far taller than them. They were humanoid.

  “How?” she marveled as they tied her to a long pole after beating her into submission. “How was there alien life on Mars?”

  She passed out as they crept along, hauling her further downstream, their over-large alien eyes and ears disturbing her even more than their firearms. Firearms were only for government personnel back on Earth. And movie stars who needed to be protected so they could keep fighting Climate Terror. The mere sight of one, in a movie, had triggered her during her freshman year at MIT while pursuing a degree in Modeling and a minor in Oppression Studies. She’d had to take a gap year in Europe where she’d met Andres the Spanish model and Climate Lecturer. He’d changed her life. He was so wise and only two years older than her. They spent much of the year, and much of a six-figure advance for a Climate Fiction novel he was supposed to write, adventure sporting across Europe. Now she was horrified that real guns were all around her now. In the hands of aliens. She suddenly felt bad for using the word “alien” as she stared in horror at her alien captors. The suit approved of her cognitive self-flagellation and rewarded her with a brief spurt of Chillex.

  The aliens looked like cats. People cats, in fact. But Tanya could’ve cared less once the Chillex kicked in. This mission had been about two women being the first to set foot on Mars. Not aliens. Not exploration. It was about diversity and feminism and triumphing over oppression. She wasn’t prepared to deal with something other than herself right now here on an alien world. The Chillex was kicking in and she felt an unwarranted sense of nobility.

  When they arrived at Coretapa, which had once been called Core Tap Alpha, they sold her to a Gurumban Merchant going up-canyon and then onto the Great Plains so that he might appear at the Great Festival before the Imperial ShroomKhan.

  In the dreams, days, and dazed awakenings that followed, Tanya watched giant gorillas carry her up a winding trail that led high onto the upper rim of the massive canyon complex. They passed burnt rock and wove through the ancient remains of cities like she’d once seen on earth. Cities that reminded her in their space-age biodiversity-style architecture crumbling into so much ruin, of New Hope, which had been built on the irradiated ruins of New Orleans after religious zealots had destroyed it, as everyone knew from the text books. Except the ruins of these cities were far more fantastic. For one, they hung upside down. As though the overhanging rim of the canyon were the ground, and the towers and temples that hung like upside-down stalactites were creeping up into the sky that was the canyon floor. Except everything was empty and abandoned. The temples were ruins that seemed universal to any culture, places that were almost familiar to her. Like the museums where she’d studied evolution and Climate Terror. The towers also were ruins. The thousands of windows looked like the gouged-out eye sockets of a beast with many eyes. Just like the crowded city hubs where most humans chose to live for access to government largesse while they pursued their dream careers in music, surfing, and pottery. But here, unlike those perpetual party places where the government sponsored raves every night in the commons to highlight hot topic social issues, here everything was silent. A bare breeze sent dust and grit skirling through their moaning passages, making the universal dirge of abandoned metal sing the lonely song of forgotten places.

  Her gorilla captors wore guns and armor like the cat people of the river basin far below. Clothes also. But they were massive. Huge. And they walked like humans. When their leader tried to talk to her, Tanya merely heard a series of clicks and grunts. He smacked her when it became apparent she had no idea what “Gruuuush” meant. And after that, they merely carried her up onto the vast dry plain heading toward the rising mega structure in the distance.

  A day’s march later they arrived before the massive pyramid.

  It climbed high into the thin air. Tanya had been having trouble breathing up here on the irradiated plain. At times she would pass out from sudden blistering heat waves. At others it was as though she were as high as a kite, deprived of oxygen. HerSafe Space Suit was attempting to keep her alive, but she was dying on this brave new world. Since the truth would only have distressed her, the suit filled her with its remaining narcotics and whispered “truths” to her.

  “No man is your equal.”

  “Gender choice is a basic human right.”

  “Look at what we have achieved once we freed ourselves from the shackles of the past.”

  And... “You can use any bathroom you want.”

  And so on and so on it blathered all its recorded platitudes as she died.

  Tanya was comforted. Blissfully comforted as they took her to the base of the gargantuan pyramid and then up the cyclopean steps of the Outer Sanctum. Many, many cities ringed the pyramid. She was sold to the Khan, or rather his personal provisions procurer, and later that day arrived in the pantry of the chief chef.

  A raptor man, he prepared her first by stripping off her Safe Space Suit. Once it had been guaranteed by the GSC to protect her from the hazards of space and Mars. From injury and emotional trauma. From anything that might ever harm her or deny her validation. Now it was gone and so were its false comforts and drugs.

  Before they began to cook her beneath the Great Pyramid, she experienced a shattering moment of sober clarity. Naked, she railed that the Lizard who was about to filet her, had no right to her body. It was her body, her choice, she’d screamed at him!

  Sadly, she mistakenly feared she was about to be raped. Which had been everyone’s greatest concern back on the Earth she came from. Being raped. Women, and men, all were trained to deal with any form of rape. From the most egregious and obvious to the far more subtle variations of mental rape. And while they were not raping her now, they were raping her mentally. Of that she was most assured as she attempted to fight off their raptor claws completely unaware that they had no desire to rape her... instead they were going to prepare her. To be more specific, the Kahn would have a nice cut from her. To be sure.

  Her brain.

  Her body would be kept alive for bridling and would most likely enter the Kahn’s stables for one of his many progenitors to ride in while away from the caves deep inside the pyramid.

  She accused them of being oppressive to women. In fact, the Great ShroomKhan preferred to ride pure strain women into battle. He held their gaits in the highest of esteems and chose them above all others as his personal mounts.

  She tried to strike the raptor men with one of her best karate kicks learned in one of her many anti-rape classes. But the blow had merely glanced off the armor-skinned monster and he’d buffeted her in the head. Stunned and swooning, she could’ve sworn she should’ve beaten them all just like the young beautiful amazons of every movie she’d ever watched. She’d even trained with the choreographer who’d trained the actress who played Black Widow in the Avengers latest movie. Avengers: Climate Terror Strikes Back.

  Now, unconscious, she surrendered to the overpowering realization that whatever was going on here couldn’t be protested, or screamed at, or seduced, or repackaged within any correct spin that would validate her as superior because she held all the right opinions. What was going on here was... reality.

  Whether she liked it or not.

  And it was insane.

  They kept her alive until just before her brain would go into the sauté pan.

  They needed the blood flowing, pumping through the meat which was the best way to keep the brain moist and tender. The way the Khan preferred it. At the end, the Lizard chef came for her, his Louisville Slugger rolling
pin in hand. And then he began to tenderize her head with this prized relic given him by the great Khan. A relic of the ancients who’d frittered away their civilization on meaningless pleasures and vapid policies, redefining words until all was meaningless. Until the realities of sure conquest by a determined foe and the folly of nuclear weapons in every hand, had destroyed their meaningless civilization. All the storytellers of every tribe that called Earth’s future their home knew how “The End” had come for the ancients.

  And what had come next. After “The End” had come the Age of Awakening as the genetic mutations that were once the playthings and pets of the idle ancients obsessed with little more than self, rose up. During “The End” nothing was wrong. Children were being redesigned and reassigned based on preference and ideology, so why not the pets. Modifying animals with advanced intelligences and nano-biology tech made them suddenly superior in many ways. Especially since animals weren’t hindered with a lot of meaningless ideals and a constant march toward an ill-defined and constantly changing utopia based on a fear of anything disagreed with. Animals were just animals. Man was no longer the apex predator at the end of “The End.” These new creatures conquered their dazed and confused rainbow-haired and genderless masters as the idiot ancients struggled to set up committees on basic human gender rights and guarantee freedoms from anything considered hate speech amid the glowing ashes and burnt remains of their nuclear Jihad-overrun cities. The chef lizard was reminded how much he loved history as he tenderized Tanya’s scalp with repeated blows. Always had. Knowing history, the sad tales of the imbecilic ancients, made him a much better chef, especially when preparing Pure Strains. Even muties too.

  Later, as he finished off Tanya’s roast pure strain brain, a rare find these days, he had no idea that this pure strain was an original recipe ancient. He merely marveled at the advanced cancer marbling within the brain, something you rarely saw in the herds that supplied the market down along the pyramid’s base. He would never have believed that Unity One had gone off course and warped right back around to its starting point. Violating physics and relativity along with time. Martin and Wendig had tried to dupe the Science Fiction problem of interstellar distance with a bit of quantum physics trickery. Defining reality regardless of reality. This is the way the world should be, they’d almost screamed in their theories. The way they wanted it to be. Instead of the way it had always been, and always would be. History, repeated again and again, had played its last trick and hurled the ship into the future. Unity One hadn’t gone anywhere with all their SciFi make-em-up trickery. Instead it had gone “anywhen” as if to show them the outcome of those who meddle with the truth. History and Science didn’t care that you tried to re-write them, they just did what they always did. The Chef Lizard had no conception of a starship or even imagined that the herds being sold in the Khan’s markets had been capable of such a feat, once. He merely felt what it must have been like to have been one of his ancient ancestors. That long-lost day when their toys, their pets, the playthings of the idiot ancients, had risen up and destroyed them because they’d emasculated themselves to the point of uselessness with all their meaningless laws and fantasy rules as they attempted to redefine reality and the way the world was. And instead made everything meaningless with word games.

  A long time ago, one of his ancient raptor forebears had first killed an ancient. Yes, it had probably been much more different than the garlic and shallots he was adding to the pan as he tossed and plated it, but the primal feel of meat over an open flame must be universal, he confessed to himself. And in that moment he felt a kinship with an unknown ancestor buried in the mists of time.

  Did the ancients not know, wondered the chef as he replaced the relic baseball bat to its ledge, above Tanya’s battered corpse, that animals would be animals? He watched as his sous chef made the incisions and dislocated Tanya’s neck. They would have the grooms-morel in there shortly, to keep the central nervous system firing and the heart pumping. And then off to the stables. Sometimes the ShroomKhan would ride the filly that had provided his latest meal if he were especially pleased. Ride her in the evening as the fading red sun sank beneath what was once Kansas on a burnt map somewhere. Four days north of the great rent that had opened the Grand Canyon from coast to coast after some ancient had used something called a CrustBuster.

  Silly ancients... did they not know there would be no mercy in the world regardless of who was on top, and who was at the bottom? No bargaining. No equality. No rules. Just power.

  And word games burnt like an ancient map when exposed to the flame of truth.

  Just the truth of it.

  Same as it ever was.

  It didn’t matter how you felt. It was always just the facts. Always the truth. The ancients had forgotten that and now they were herd animals. But some must have known that, speculated the raptor as he plated Tanya’s brain and called for the Captain of Butlers. The others, they had fallen for the lie that it wasn’t. That games could be played with words and somehow the truth could be re-written to make it what you wanted it to be. That nothing was ever wrong.

  The pets, as the Tribes had once been, they knew different. For them it was all about power. They would not lie to themselves as the idiots had.

  Nature, as everyone knew, thought the lizard, abhors a lie.

  And one lie leads to another as liars lie to hold onto power, and in the end not even a compass can be trusted. Or a clock. Or a safe space suit.

  It was John, and those like him, who’d killed them all.

  AUTO AMERICA

  By

  E.J. Shumak

  When the system is automated, how long can you get away with it?

  The blue and red lights combined behind me to fill my car with a deep purple hue. I pulled my Tesla/Mopar to the curb and waited patiently. Watching in the rearview I saw the android blue meanie (Not my terminology, but I don’t know what else to call it) slither up to my now open window.

  “Citizen, I must ask you to disembark and produce your paperwork.”

  Boy was there a scream when the blue boys started asking for “paper(s)”. But we all got over it and like everything else; it was just too expensive to change. “Yes, servant, but first I must inquire as to the purpose of your inquiry.” Always be polite but offensive in word choice and double on up on any “trigger” words.

  “There is a problem… ”

  And always interrupt if at all possible. “Yeah, I figured there was a problem but you have thus far refused to provide the data surrounding same.”

  “My sensors indicated that your vehicle is lacking a current safety sticker.”

  “Sensors are prone to error and there is a safety certificate prominently displayed within sensor range right now.”

  “That is true, citizen, however… ”

  “That is true, thank you I am leaving now.” I switched the Mopar into forward/slow.

  “Citizen, I must insist… ” and the Mopar locked up again. It continued, “Section 343.305 Sub 4e requires… ”

  “That a citizen operating a M/V submit—which I did and you said my statement was true and 343.309 sub2 has been adjudicated unreasonable and is thereby struck, Have you been properly updated?

  ”I have been updated… stand by… connecting…”

  Since I hadn’t been ordered to specifically do or not do anything (the stand by – connecting was innocuous enough) I pushed the forward switch again and powered fully up. I started taking alternate streets and the blue boy was still there apparently reconnecting when I drove by one block over heading south now. Heading home I wondered if the DMV nastygram would get there before me.

  It had never been this easy before. The holiday must have taken its toll on the programmers. It’s not like you could get away with anything. They certainly knew where you lived and where your funds were.

  As I pulled into my driveway, there was a squad already there, Yeah a REAL squad with a real freakin’ human standing next to it. “What can I do
for you, sir?”

  “Mr. Babcock. We’re going to have to have a conversation.”

  “For an expired sticker?”

  “No sir, for Rhetoric, class two.”

  “What the hell? You’re here for a speech violation, I thought we had a first amendment.”

  “Just get in the back, Babcock. You’ve been scanned and cleared for transport.”

  I hadn’t seen a real breathing cop, other than on the vids, for nearly a year. Now one is hauling me in. I scooted into the back of the Toyota interceptor. “Look officer, what is this really about?”

  “Listen Babcock, you’ve been doing this crap your entire life. You can’t just say anything you want. Yes we have a first amendment, but you can’t attack protected sub-groups. And you certainly can’t use rhetoric to do so—and to attempt control thereby.”

  “Whoa, what did I do and to who?”

  “You used rhetoric to dissuade and control the actions of a member of a protected minority.”

  “What? When? Exactly who?”

  “As of 0800 this morning, synthetic humans have been adjudicated a protected sub-group minority. You violated the heck out of blue boy’s rights back there on the Avenue.”

  A PLACE FOR EVERYONE

  By

  Ray Blank

  When the system is fully automated, who is really in control?

  Eventually they called my name. “Umberto Huffer to counter 12, please.” I rose to my feet, wiping my sweaty palms against my trousers.

  Three service operatives sat behind the window. As far as I could tell, they were: a young cis female indie-clone, a brawny cis male whose turban implied he was Sikh, and a forty-something trans female emo who might identify as caucasian. The latter gave me hope. Per all reports, trans operatives are more sympathetic to oddballs like me. A supervisor lurked at the back of their booth, sporting a bushy beard as gray as his cardigan. I inferred he was a cis male.