Slave Stories

by Bahr, Laura Lee

  When it came time to leave, Mark chose to stay. We imagined he wanted for some of their newfound reality to rub off on him. The rest of us could sympathize, but felt we should scour our buildings for more of what Levé had found. Our bad climate wasn’t inevitable then. There was still a future in which we were raping, and the sun was in our hair, and naked from the waist down we bounced like monkeys on a spring. In the dead ones there was a peace that wasn’t in our homes. It was about this time we noticed a smell we couldn’t identify. It didn’t come from us but from the people of the city. Those people we saw walking places wherever we went. Leaving Mark, we decided to follow some to wherever they went. We tailed hundreds that night and through into the next day. It’s important now that I recount those hours without feeling them. What speaks out of me is something meticulously empty. The only way I could stay alive was as a variable, that which can be anything and so is never something. We followed and the pattern was always the same. All they did was walk. The bags they carried never got opened. They never arrived where they were going. No jobs, no families, no people inside the bodies. Just one street after another to make the city look lived in. Just the enhanced whiteness of faces everywhere. And then we realized that we’d been following each other, that our facility for facial recognition had finally burnt out. And then we forgot it again.

  Thus we saw more clearly what we were. For whoever witnesses the insect brains of their brothers and sisters witnesses their own too. And what was the fate of insects made dickless by a dog? It was this impotence in the face of one all-encompassing face that made mirrors fair game for conversation.

  We all found our way back to the centre with the dead ones, inferring each other’s presence by counting and body mass. The others have been still for a long time now.

  I must be the only one left that’s still taking notes.

  I ghost write the end-of-the-world scenario to end all end-of-the-world scenarios.

  Municipal Election 3B

  —Mick Clocherty

  Fifty ditches, that makes an afternoon’s work. Tony lit a cigar and fiddled with his shackles. He’d been promised a bottle of whisky for the week’s work, and figured Larry would be back at the cabin already. There was a piano and a deck of cards waiting for him, and maybe a night free from the usual abject misery. He heard a low rumbling and tutted.

  The machine crawled towards him on its crude wheels, spewing out tracts and stickers along the dusty trail it left behind. It had what looked like pieces of tubing for arms, and a colander sat atop its stern iron face, permanently fixed into an expression resembling a politician on Remembrance Sunday. The stickers it fired out were marked with a red “X”, and covered everything the robot left in its wake. Tony rolled his eyes and turned his back to it; only to be confronted with a similar machine approaching him from the other side. This machine was identical to the first one, but its tracts and stickers bore a black “O” instead.

  Tony stubbed out his cigar. The two rusty goliaths towered over him, as he leaned against a picket fence with his shovel over his shoulder.

  “Citizen, Municipal Election 3b is fast approaching. Citizen, please register to vote in Municipal Election 3b. Mark your card with an “X” and remain a proud member of Shell County.”

  It sounded like a Cold War propaganda announcer.

  “Yeh,” said Tony.

  “Citizen, Municipal Election 3b is fast approaching. Citizen, please register to vote in Municipal Election 3b. Mark your card with an “O” and give your overlord the mandate to declare independence for his property. This is a step towards true freedom.”

  It spoke with the exact same tinny apple pie voice-box.

  “Uh-huh,” said Tony, “I’m goin’ home.”

  Tony started away from the machines, but found himself cornered by the X-bot and O-bot.

  “Citizen, please report to your polling station to vote in Municipal Election 3b,” they droned in unison.

  “You think this decision is worth a damn to a ditch-diggin’ slave? The ancient Romans never made their slaves put up with this shit,” said Tony, being quite a well-read human object.

  The O-bot burped out a piece of paper from what looked like a Sinclair ZX Spectrum grafted to its chest and handed it to Tony. The paper read: “The Birth of a Nation: Six Benefits for Slaves in an independent South-West!”. He crumpled the page into a ball and kicked it into a ditch, before being hit in the face with another sheet, which read: “Don’t Go It Alone! Six Benefits for Slaves who remain a part of Shell County!”

  Tony really needed that drink.

  “Look, the colours on the flag and the emblem on the transfer papers is all that’s gonna change if I vote circle, and I ain’t happy enough about my current situation to vote ecks. The only reason any of us poor schlubs votes in these things is ’cause you robots force us to. What’s the point?”

  “We bring choice—” cried the X-bot.

  “The illusion of choice,” retorted Tony.

  “The creation of a new state is not an illusion. I offer you a true chance to change the world!” the O-bot chipped in.

  “All right, so your sole purpose, the reason you were built, is to encourage people to vote circle in Municipal Election 3B?”

  “Correct.”

  “So in eventually achieving this goal, you bring about your own obsolescence. You tell us to vote circle, but if we all did, we’d have no need for ya any more. What you really need in order to survive, is everyone to vote ecks.”

  The robots looked at each other.

  “And you,” Tony the slave continued, “in encouraging everyone to vote ecks, are doing the same thing. See, with no one voting circle, and a uniform identity being established in these elections, you also campaign for your own demise. The only way you can be sure of surviving then, is if some people vote circle. Enough people at least, to keep the whole damn charade goin’.”

  This prompted a cacophony of clicking and whistles, as the machines processed Tony’s argument. After a while, they responded together:

  “Citizen, please exercise your democratic right, and vote—”

  “X” said the O-bot

  “O” said the X-bot

  Within a moment, the robots began erratically screeching “ERROR” over and over again, whilst flailing their arms around in a futile attempt to bat at sparks coming out of their processors. Seconds later, they were slumped over and shrouded in smoke. Dead machines.

  Tony buried them where he buried all of the others and made his way back to the cabin. He’d been promised a bottle of whisky for the week’s work, and figured Larry would be there already. There was a piano and a deck of cards waiting for him, and maybe a night free from the usual abject misery. Monday would bring further toiling, and with it, Municipal Election 3C.

  To Imagine Disaster is to Invoke the Same

  —Violet LeVoit

  I could poison the biscuits. I could get liquored up and play chicken on black back roads. I could whistle at a white woman. There are so many ways to die in Shell County.

  But we’re not in Shell County. We’re in an interactive walled suite in deep Ersatz, and Mr. Creep is deep in me. The walls flicker with holographic bougainvillea and rabid dogs hunching their funny sick dance on dirt streets. My skirts are pushed up so high I’m almost suffocating in petticoats. His fifteen minutes are almost up. And now they are.

  He puts five dollars in my pocket when he’s done and sighs, “Just give me a second.” I give him as long of a second as is legally allowed and then I stick the needle in his jugular. I inject him with a brew of neurotoxins that wipe out the residuals from orgasm, the oxytocin and the prolactin and the endorphins. He knows they’ll scan him at the door, won’t let him out on the street until his brain chemistry’s back to baseline anyway. I watch the peaceful expression on his face deflate like a detumescent penis. “Couldn’t give me that five dollars back, could you?” he says, bitterly, as I hand him his hat, and we both know the answer.

&
nbsp; After he leaves I put the five dollars in the pneumatic tube and never see it again.

  In the Mockingbird room there’s a chifferobe in the corner and an axe at the ready. The holograms wriggle in and out like night swimming. There’s jars of peach preserves. There’s shining crosses and nooses swinging in the trees. There’s parlors with Victrolas and dewy pitchers of sweet tea. There’s devils at the crossroads. I’ve never been to Shell County.

  I don’t think Mr. Creep has, either. He pants his wish list when he’s on top of me again. “General Lee,” he gasps. “Country ham. A hard man is good to find.” This time he ties me up with kudzu vines. He rubs molasses into my breasts. He wants to see as many stars when he comes as the Confederate Flag has. He stuffs cotton bolls in my mouth. “Come on, Eli Whitney,” he cajoles. “Spit out the seeds.”

  We’re both thankful we don’t have the Black Dog. I’m grateful that our relationship only gives me the normal amount of misery.

  The next time he sees me he won’t give me the five dollars. “What if…?” he says, his eyes shining like the grease on a grilled peanut butter and bacon sandwich. I don’t get the gist. They keep the rooms hot and humid here and it’s making me cranky. I should have worked the Ottawa wing instead, where the girls squat out hockey pucks and roll their goosepimply flesh in poutine. I wanted to be in the Mockingbird room because I thought it meant I would be treated nicely. For once.

  I swat him with my lace fan. “Ah declay-yuh,” I growl.

  “Think about it,” he says, and I get his meaning.

  Now when he comes to see me I do nothing. He does nothing. He gives me five dollars and I put it in the chamber pot under the bed. That’s what gives us pleasure now, not the orgasm I’ve got to snatch back from him as soon as I dole it out. This money that they give him will soon stand proud in a smart little stack that Ersatz’s underground railroad will be happy to trade for a quick smuggle out to the real Shell County. “I’ve never been there,” he sighs. Me neither. The heavy scent of magnolia. Gracious smiles. Fireflies and lemonade on porches blessed with sweet breeze from lazy fans. The soft singing of happy slaves. Fiddle-dee-dee.

  The day we make our escape he looks grey. “Bless your heart,” I hear myself say, charming to the end, “y’all look like you’ve a touch of the vapors.”

  “I’m all right,” he says, in a way that sounds weary and far away. “Today’s the day.”

  We pore over the walls with our fingertips, feeling for the seam in the holographic wallpaper. He finds it, calls me over to claw at it until both our fingertips are bloody. There’s the ventilation grate. He rips me out of my petticoats so I can fit down the airshaft, so I can tumble through a galvanized darkness that cuts me on every welded seam as I howl down, down, crashing hard to the alley where the smuggler awaits to nail us into a box as soon as we press the stack of bills into her hands. Her T-shirt reads: FOLLOW THE DRINKING GOURD.

  We’re pressed close together in the straw as she nails the box planks shut. Darkness, and only the sound of our breathing, nose against mouth.

  I breathe his air for too long.

  When she crowbars off the lid I’ve got the Black Dog. The sun is hotter and brighter than I’ve ever seen and I want to die. “You lied to me,” I moan. He can’t say anything. The tears are rolling down his cheeks.

  “You’re free,” the smuggler says, and stalks away. We can’t bring ourselves to get out of the box. Something heavy and brutal inside us presses us down into the straw. Not even thirst brought on by the baking sun can lift us out.

  He’s got the fever worse than me, sobbing into the filthy straw and clawing at his face. Come on, I think, near delirious, get up and get something to drink. They drink well here. Sweet tea or lemonade or Pepsi heavy on the syrup or white lightning moonshine or spring water so cold and clean it flows down your throat tasting like all your sins forgiven.

  I poke my head over the edge of the box. I thought it would be lush and perfumed with flowers. This is desert, mockingly bleak and baked. Narrow ramshackle shacks speckle the horizon like pimples. I wanted vast plantations. I wanted cotillions and Tangee lipstick and colored maids with soft hands pressing my pretty dresses and polishing my silver.

  There’s a girl, a teenager in cut-offs and a pink halter. She’s pulling a root out of the ground, a shotgun slung across her back. She’s pregnant and toothless. Her eyes are high and slanted and her freckles look like buckshot spatter and the back of her neck is burned an angry pink.

  He’s convulsing next to me, jamming his fist in his mouth, trying to choke on his tongue, trying so hard to die. I know I’m next. I don’t want to go thirsty to my grave. A belle deserves better.

  “Please,” I beg, “Give me something to drink.”

  She doesn’t say anything. She weighs me, my torn skin and dry lips. Her eyes flick as quick as a lizard’s tongue to the right. And that’s where I see it, cutting through the dust: a river of blood, red-brown like garnets, the heady stuck pig stink of it gathering flies.

  “You kin drink tha-yut,” she says, and as she dips her two hands into the gore I see the mouth of the river, the mountain of brown-skinned corpses atop the hill, and how they’re what waters everything here. And for one last fleeting moment, I feel as ashamed as I deserve, until the fever hits me.

  On the Sculpting of Mountains and

  the Act of Dying

  (words and art by Shane Swank)

  There lies a place at the northern edge of what was once known as Wisconsin in the United States before the Slave State fully occupied the dying planet Earth and put in place its parallel prison planet. The Northern most area, that at one time had been rather lush and green, is now a smouldering cesspool and awash with scarred topography. Vaginal shaped fissures in the landscape spew forth vile gases, fumes and smoke into the bowl between the newly formed mountains. It is home.

  The Kock Brothers owned mining operations in the region—on top of all their other planet raping industries worldwide. They used a methodology then known as fracking, which split tectonic plates causing vast eruptions of methane gases. Then came the landmass shifts, sinkholes, mountains and valleys where none had existed before. This area of the earth had not been re-sculpted this drastically since it was dissected by the glaciers.

  Areas of the displaced Great Lakes violently bubble sulphur scented gases into the air as if the planet were erupting foul flatulence and waste from a bleeding, torn sphincter. Vast portions of the wildlife have become extinct. Had the area been more densely populated by humans, they too would have slipped into oblivion.

  There were some human survivors—although very few in that upper third of the former state of Wisconsin. As far as the fauna goes, the crows seem untouched, you could even say they thrived. Vast murders of crows blacken the sky at times. Perhaps because they are able to feed so well on the human remains scattered throughout the once industrial city on the bay. To this day it is populated by the heartiest of cannibals, con-men and killers.

  The takeover of the dying planet happened in stages. Stages that have been transpiring over hundreds of years by creatures who have the same regard for humans that a sadistic boy has for an ant under a magnifying glass on a bright summer day.

  While they were certainly not the first, the greed driven Kock Brothers are in some ways the grand finale of man’s dominion over the planet. The brothers have been implanted with a DNA/RNA altering retro-engineered virus that has escaped detection because the virus is four dimensional, like the new masters themselves.

  Being of the fourth dimension ensures that the pathogens are invisible—humans cannot actually see anything that is of higher dimensions. This is, of course, an advantage to the new masters.

  This 4D virus implants the human host with emotions that are indicative of the reptilian races who wander distant space and neighbouring dimensions. A cold blooded lack of empathy for anything other than what might serve their immediate needs and desire. Instant gratification. In the brother’s case, wea
lth and unchecked power is the prize. Approximately four percent of the population was infected with this virus initially. Only half of that four percent were the wealthiest, most powerful citizens of the North American landmass.

  By direct and indirect manipulation, the overlords are able to control humans, society and thereby the entire world. Much

  of the work of the alien 4D retrovirus has amplified the nature of greed and hatred in man. It is already a rich dark loam to plant seed in. One only has to feed a dog bloody raw meat and beat it savagely for the conditioning it needs to become savage, primal, uncontrollable.

  A mad black dog…

  The obscenely wealthy have bought power and influence, councilman, senators, congressmen. Judges, lawyers and cops, bankers and financiers. They purchase Presidents and Supreme Courts who write new laws then flagrantly disregard them. There is no need for a mass bio-engineering—by infecting the wealthy and most powerful the misery of all mankind is ensured. Humankind’s corporations have become the Slave State’s greatest tool in manufacturing what the master’s want, need and desire most…human misery. Fear, disease, lives that are far worse than death and at times, death, that sweet respite, is even withheld.

  The true masters of the Slave State feed upon this human misery…WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA, Pac-Man eats the misery pellets…LEVEL UP.

  Well before the mines had been populated by human suffering (all for worthless clay and minerals); before the Black Dog was released on humanity, snarling, salivating and soul devouring; long before the appearance of the true tormenters became commonplace, the intensely satisfying, sweetly soporific human suffering was the sweet opium of the Masters. They are murderous, thieving junkies for the satisfying state of human suffering. They have been here eternally, silent, waiting…