by D'Urso, J.
LUCIA
A bloated tick of a Shatarin was the first to die. Though he nearly knocked Lucia over with a swing of his undulating breasts—Lucia was disgusted that a man could be bustier than herself—she dodged the wave of shaking blubber and slashed his throat with her hairpin. He gasped for air with bulging eyes and drowned in his own blood; when his slave-wife—all six of them, in fact—barreled at Lucia to avenge the death of their oppressor, she produced a shotgun she’d inexplicably managed to conceal beneath her corset over the course of the day, and splattered their brains across the tile floors. With each shot, their bodies, torn apart in quivering mounds, began to assume the appearance and consistency of spoiled puttanesca.
She caught sight of Sargon, her prized submissive, who did not move or fight against the salivating Shatarin men ripping off his sheer, seductive clothing. He did not respond to Lucia’s commands, or her anger at his unwillingness to escape, but she soon realized that he had no choice in the matter: a collar, stamped with a label identifying him as a “Sensitivity Trainee,” was locked in place around his neck—an example of collectivist innovation that extended their control over individuals from simple punitive taxes and social pressures to direct tyranny over thought and action. His Shatarin rapists, before they could even lay a finger on his near-naked body, fell at Lucia’s blood-soaked hands. She tore off her designer brassiere and pulled it taut like a chain; the Shatarins’ eyes filled with red and their lips turned blue when she wrapped the armbands around their necks and forced the air from their lungs. Bare-breasted and filled with a mother’s fury, she slammed her stiletto heels into their chests and knocked their limp corpses to the floor, and took Sargon by the hand.
A band of radical feminists, their breasts exposed and hair buzzed down to their skulls, pulled tomatoes from the kitchen and hurled them at Lucia’s feet. They had the kind of bodies that the overconfident and delusional would label “curvy,” though “obese” was a far more appropriate adjective. “Women are people, not objects!” they shrieked. “You’re a shrill of the Patriarchy! You’re a selfish seller of women’s bodies! You’re perpetuating rape culture!”
“Oh yes,” Lucia laughed, sliding a set of knives out of a woodblock on the countertop. “The Patriarchy: that elusive force you can neither prove nor define. My girls aren’t selling their bodies—they’re selling a service, one that has never fallen out of demand over the entire course of history. And what you female-fascists don’t seem to understand is that I have never forced them into this profession, and I have always enforced their right to choose their own clients; this is not slavery, it has never been slavery, and it will never be slavery. You claim that women have the right to choose the manner in which they live their lives, but you condemn them for exercising their freedom of choice, all because they don’t follow what you dictate as being right for them.”
“You’re a dirty slut!” the champions of women’s dignity and rights hissed. “You and your filth bitches are worthless, disgusting whores! We hope your next client rapes and kills you and leaves your body in a ditch!”
“Typical,” Lucia groaned with a roll of her eyes. She held the knives in her hand like a fan of razor-sharp playing cards, ready to deal her enemies what they deserved. “Once a woman refuses to go along with the farce you call ‘feminism,’ you slut-shame her, when slut shaming is something you claim to be fighting against. And apparently, rape isn’t much of a serious issue to you, either, given you’re willing to throw that word around like a casual interjection and insult us with threats of sexual assault. Very classy of you. But you, my dear supremacists, are the worst objectifiers of women of all—but luckily for the working women of this city, you will perpetuate their weakness and victimhood no longer.” And with a flick of her wrist the knives went flying across the room, and the hypocrites met a swift and merciless demise.
“Sudika!” Lucia shouted as she bolted out the front door. First came the smell of gas fuel, then only a ringing in her ears; an explosion rocked the Bordello della Libertà, unleashing a cloud of flame and smoke from the kitchen windows. Sudika covered her face and Lucia felt shards of glass raining down upon her hair, but she ignored the dangers and pulled her protégée by the wrist out into the street. The girl protested, refusing to leave their beloved brothel behind, but Lucia insisted on it.
“We’ll rebuild,” she promised, waving on the rest of her employees, who leapt over the mountainous bodies of slain evildoers to follow her. “The Freedom Whores are gathering on Evita Avenue, and we are to be their guests of honor. It’s about time we brought this city to its knees. Its citizens will be devastated to learn that we’re not the only ones who kneel.”
••
SUDIKA
The bold banner swayed in the wind as the activists stretched it across the width of Evita Avenue. In spite of the lively cacophony that left each outcry indistinct, the sign made all the protesters’ cries clear, in bold-faced letters: “Dear Government: Out of our beds, out of our wallets!” It swept down the city block and pushed autos and buses out of its way like a broom pushing dust, and the hand that cleaned Talpretta of its societal filth was manifold: it was the crowd that gathered on the avenue that morning, who marched with their backs painted gold by the rising sun, with signs and flags held high and their eyes set firmly on the marble face of city hall. The legislature had always stood as a stone mountain that could never be moved or reshaped, and it would bow to no one, but on that day, when all the city’s escorts gathered in the name of liberation, it was an autumn leaf in a storm. Thousands of voices were thunder, and the light of morning flashing on painted signs was lightning, and, like a primeval, omnipotent force of nature, they cast down everything in their path as if the obstacles were dead trees and paper houses.
Digital billboards that once flaunted flashy, expensive ads for all sorts of useless commodities, and even more useless celebrities, now proudly broadcast the faces of the women and men who marched for their right to be compensated for their services, no matter how base or carnal. They were the champions of civil liberties, though too many dismissed them for the vulgar nature of their highest goals; they were the preservers of a free market in which a government had no right to deny an exchange between consenting adults; they were the “Freedom Whores with a Right to Work” whose name shone from news screens across the city of Talpretta, who fought for the freedom to do business as individuals, not a devalued whole. At every street corner they found a blazing torch in place of a lamppost. On the sidewalks and in dark alleys, they saw paths paved with gold.
“Unions, get off our planet!” they chanted.
“Capitalism, not cronyism!” they demanded.
“Sex is money, and money is good!” they proclaimed. “Let us have both!”
Every planetary news network burst into a frenzied panic, and every reporter, anchor and pundit trembled with visible anxiety as they announced that a city-wide strike had paralyzed Talpretta: it was not orchestrated by the unions, who cared little for the financial stability of those who could not afford to strike, but had no choice. The workers who marched on the legislature exercised their freedom of choice and chose to rise up against the insidious tyranny of coerced compassion at gunpoint, which led only to the abolition of ambition and the prosecution of productivity. They had a right to work, they chanted; no man or woman had the right to tell them the limits of their contributions or the extent of their involuntary charity. It was not their place to lower themselves to the level of those beneath them. For Talpretta to prosper again, those beneath them would have to find the virtue to raise themselves higher, but until the legislature accepted their demands, there would be no prosperity.
“This is what your beloved union has done!” Sudika shouted before the regal doors of the whitewashed temple of corrupted law. The elegant halls of the Bordello della Libertà appeared on the billboard screens, recorded by Lucia’s security cameras for the world to see the atrocities committed at the hands of the peaceful and tol
erant wards of the union and its collectivist bosses. The city gasped at each thrust of a Shatarin rapist inside an innocent woman, and cursed the Xaztechuans who stuffed their pockets with the hard-earned property of those who were forced to support them and accept their roles as victims. But it was when the smug face of Mr. Trygassi, the reputable, respectable and progressive advocate of the most genuinely benevolent Sexual Labor Union of Tapretta, grinned in sick satisfaction on each screen in every public square and private home, that the citizens of a city gone astray declared their outrage, and the politicians who cowered in their offices had no choice but to surrender.
“We concede!” cried the speaker for the planetary legislature, gripping his microphone as if it were a rope, and he had just been thrown overboard from a ship that carried escaped slaves to freedom in a foreign land. “You will have your right to work!”
“We have always had it!” Sudika testified with Lucia’s hand in hers, and the crowd exploded with applause. “And it will never be taken from us again!”
••
LUCIA
In a few short months the Bordello della Libertà rose from the ashes and stood more proudly than it ever had before. The Sexual Labor Union of Talpretta paid for the rebuilding in full, having been hopelessly defeated in court after the Freedom Whores sued it for damages, and Lucia made sure to bleed it dry, sparing no expense for the renovation. Trygassi, while at the bank withdrawing union dues from the S.L.U.T.’s accounts for his own personal spending, was approached by a man in a straw hat, dark sunglasses and a button-down bedazzled with tropical flowers, who thrust a subpoena into his hand and disappeared out the door without a word. He was sentenced to personally pay for the lost income of all those hard-working harlots who surrendered hours to the lackluster and lazy. The courts drained his bank accounts, which were already overflowing with silver and gold, but even with all his unearned and undeserved wealth, he still couldn’t make up the difference; he surrendered all assets, even the clothes on his back, and was left hungry and naked in the street. And when higher government agencies uncovered his years of tax evasion, they threw him in jail, and denied him an orange uniform, because he couldn’t afford one. Lucia, on the other hand, bought herself a new designer dress, which she wore to the exoport on the other side of town.
Sudika stood at the boarding gate with a leather handbag and a mountain of luggage behind her, packed full with low-cut blouses and miniskirts imported from the extravagant boutiques of Coral Grove. She held a stack of paper Talents in her hand, clutched to her heart like a gift she refused to give away or even allow to be seen, simply because she cherished it so deeply. Her smile and wide-eyed expression conveyed her sense of excitement, of hope and faith in the future; in the same moment, Lucia couldn’t discern the glistening tears as a mark of joy or of sadness, perhaps both. It was something Lucia had encouraged for a long time, and now that the two of them had reached the crossroads they’d always imagined with such optimism, Lucia couldn’t help but miss her protégée before she’d even boarded the shuttle.
“So the city’s free again,” Sudika said with a wistful smile. “I guess it’s my turn, now.”
“You’ll never have to worry about living these horrors again,” Lucia insisted. “On Acadica, the S.L.U.T. would never gain a hold on even a single brothel. The unions have never had power in the Colonies, and they have no future there.”
“It sounds like a utopia.”
“Well, as close as humanity can get.”
It was a world where Sudika could work to the fullest extent of her ability, never limited by arbitrary caps on her hours for the sake of those who had no desire to work hard, or work at all. She could speak her mind without concern for the childish and narcissistic sensitivity of others, for it was a world where the right to not be offended was an unheard-of phenomenon. Even those who disagreed with her opinion would fight to the death for her right to say it, and she, Lucia knew, would do the same. Acadica was a world for a girl like Sudika. She would never again have to live in fear of an ideology that sought to lower her to the level of society’s most unproductive dregs, or organizations who condemned her for her achievements, viewing achievement as evidence of selfishness and contemptible pride. On Acadica, achievement was the pinnacle of personal value. “Need” was a worthless societal currency, and when Lucia watched Sudika step onto the shuttle with a tearful smile, she knew that she would need for nothing, for the only limit to her prosperity would be the limits she imposed on herself. And Lucia knew that self-limitation was something Sudika, nor any of her Freedom Whores, would ever allow.
About the Authors
J. D’Urso and E. Bryan, the creators of the novelette series Aethertales and the full novel The Aetherverse, first met at Binghamton University in 2008. D’Urso, an Italian-American from Long Island, NY, received a BA in the Arabic language but has since entered the healthcare field, first in New York City and more recently Washington, DC. Bryan, an Argentine-American living in South Florida, obtained two BAs in History and Political Science, and a Master’s of Science, becoming a scientist of global strategic communications.
The authors are outspoken critics of the current state of political and social affairs in the United States of America, and seek to spark a dialog that can change the unfortunate status quo. The Aetherverse reflects their views, often in a heavy-handed but necessary manner; writing a novel was their best means of speaking out and making a difference, and they hope that it will inspire others to stand up against the insidious mentality that is slowly eroding the fabric of this once great nation.
Visit the official website at:
www.theaetherverse.com
