In-Jokes of the Philly Left :: a selective compendium ::

 My last post was very serious and I don't know if I can sleep tonight. So I will try to inject a little levity on this blog. The following are my favorite in-jokes of the Philly Left. Hopefully they will help me sleep.

"All Cats Are Beautiful" - This is what ACAB stands for, because the Left in Philly has a lot of cat-lovers. Personally, I'm a dog person, but it's helpful to remind police if they are suspicious of your ACAB button, shirt or bumper sticker, that all it really means is "All Cats Are Beautiful." There's really nothing deeper to it than that.

"Anonymous Anarchists" - This is probably the most in-jokey of all Philly Leftist in-jokes. During a General Assembly at Occupy ICE in the summer of 2018, a small group of masked, self-identified "anarchists" (not affiliated with any of the groups in the coalition, which included many anarchists) seized the microphone and read from a long list of complaints and distributed a document that become commonly known as "The 18 Page Screed," directed against the socialist organizations in the coalition. It was polarizing and divisive and led to friction between socialists and anarchists in the coalition. While some of us were sympathetic to the concerns expressed in "The 18 Page Screed," we didn't appreciate the disruption and the division they sowed. Since then it's been a joke. That Halloween I dressed as an "Anonymous Anarchist" at a party, as a kind of parody Leftist boogeyperson. The other day, I caught myself saying "an anonymous anarchist sci fi blog" in a text to a comrade, and immediately texted a follow up: "Oh God, I just said 'Anonymous Anarchist.' Shades of '18."

"Fully Automated Luxury Gayspace Communism" - a Queer variant of the meme "Fully Automated Luxury Communism," an expression of the goal of a post-scarcity economy. Originally, the addition of "Space" before "Communism" indicated an interest in space exploration and interplanetary solidarity. The "Gayspace" comes from combining "gay" with "safe space," a much derided term among the Far Right (and among plenty of conservatives, moderates and even liberals). It really should technically be "Queerspace," but "Gayspace" flows better (although "Queerspace" sounds like a faster alternative to hyperspace from Babylon 5).

"Gritty is Antifa"/"Gritty is a Worker"/"Fellow Worker Gritty" - Philly has a reputation (probably deserved) for being particularly militant about our sports teams. Gritty, the newest Philly sports mascot who resembles a fearsome, deranged muppet, premiered around the same time as a massive anti-Trump protest, and Gritty showed up at that protest. Gritty gained a reputation associated with the Radical Left. The Alt Right attempted to appropriate Gritty like Pepe the Frog. It didn't work. Gritty is a fellow worker (in spirit; but not officially a member of the IWW because the local chapter refused to accept soft pretzels as union dues) and you can follow the googly-eyed, orange hellion on Twitter. Gritty tends to be associated with Antifa (which is not an organization, but an idea that fascism should be resisted). The Phantoms publicity team even affirmed his status as "Antifa" and a "nonbinary Leftist icon."

"One Sick Cloud" - The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) has a concept called the "One Big Union." It's the ultimate goal of Industrial Unionism, a Union that covers all workers. The Philadelphia IWW, at least until a certain point not long ago, had a lot of people vaping. Hence, "One Sick Cloud." For obvious reasons, this has fallen out of favor, much like vaping itself.

Cops are the Real Terrorists :: A Dispatch from the Neoliberal Police State of Philadelphia ::

 I love my city. I love its people. But the government of my city has made the people the enemy.

If the behavior of our police and their so-called "union," the FOP, is any indication, there is no line they will not cross, including using, for propaganda purposes, the child of a person they brutalized and terrorized.

During the protests this week, a 28-year old Black woman named Rickia Young, fearing for the safety of her teenage nephew, drove to pick him up from a friend's house. She took her toddler with her because she couldn't leave the child alone. She was being responsible. She was looking out for her family, knowing the dangers that lurk here for Black people.

Rickia, a home health aid and mother, was caught in her SUV between protesters and the police. They police told her to turn around. While she was making a K-turn, as the police directed her to do, the police swarmed her car and dragged her and her teenage nephew out of the vehicle. The woman and the teenager were brutalized by the police, and detained prior to being taken to a hospital. They were also separated from Rickia's toddler.

What happened next reveals the true face of policing in Philadelphia. The child was picked up by a police officer, and a photo was taken of the officer holding the child. Then, the FOP (Fraternal Order of Police, which is not in fact a union, but rather a fraternal order with a bargaining contract) posted this picture on their social media platform, claiming the child was found wandering barefoot and implying parental neglect.

Rickia was Black in the wrong place and the wrong time. Her teenage nephew and her child were Black at the wrong place and the wrong time. These days, that time and place seems to be the entire country. It was probably always that way, but I didn't know it when I was younger.

Rickia was not "looting" or even protesting. She was not even charged with a crime. Her child was separated from her by force, by the police, who then used a picture of the child for "copaganda."

The police are the real terrorists. They brutalized and terrorized this family. And as always, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who oversaw the police in Portland when they openly collaborated  with White Supremacist gangs during clashes with protesters several years ago, spoke up after the fact. Outlaw is new to Philadelphia, but she has a history of overseeing cops who deploy excessive and indiscriminate violence against protesters and non-protesting civilians, and who collaborate with white supremacists. We saw this in June when a white supremacist mob of vigilantes beat up a journalist and another civilian in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, after curfew, while the cops watched and did nothing.

Neighborhoods in my city are being tear gassed. I smelled it in the air this week, wafting in from 52nd Street, when I took a walk to help me sleep better, because I now dread the sound of the low-flying helicopters oppressively hovering over my neighborhood. Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of childhood asthma of any city in the country, and among children with asthma in Philadelphia, Black children are significantly overrepresented. Many of these children live in the primarily Black neighborhoods being tear gassed. There was tear gas deployed in June, too, and rubber bullets, and the National Guard, and now this city's people are being once again declared the enemy of Capital, of Private Property, and the Racist, Neoliberal Police State.

We in Philadelphia are traumatized. We are terrified. We fear for the safety of our families, our neighbors, our coworkers, and for those of us in the caring professions, the people we serve.

To quote a great moral warrior, "The line must be drawn here. This far, and no further." (Picard, Star Trek: First Contact.)

I am living in a neoliberal police state that sees the people as the enemy.

There are lines I am willing to cross in the fight for freedom against racism and capitalism, but using children as propaganda, and hurting innocent people, and separating them from their children, are not among them.

Police are the protectors of private property. Human life is a secondary concern to them, because only humans, war and natural disasters can threaten private property, and the police have no power to arrest a war or a natural disaster. So they make us the enemy. They brutalize, terrorize and murder the people.

They call in the National Guard and they call that "mutual aid." That's beyond appropriation. It's Orwellian Newspeak.

The city and the media are pushing a narrative about election unrest, but that's not what has people here enraged. Not at all. Almost none of the people protesting in my city give two fucks about Biden Vs. Trump. They mostly agree with me that Trump is a symptom of a disease called Late Stage Capitalism. No election in the United States has ended or ever could end racism or the capitalist system that sustains it. It takes grassroots organizing and direct action to fight racism and end capitalism. It takes a bottom-up kind of democracy, the democratization of daily life. I call that democratization Anarchism. Anarchism is democracy in its purest form. And this "election unrest" narrative is extremely self-serving of the Democratic Party, which dominates local politics here. A "blue" city can be just as racist as a "red" city. It's not about red or blue. It's about racism and anti-racism.

People are in my city are not "rioting" over the election. Our concerns are entirely local. We want the city to be more compassionate and less violent. We want the city to house the homeless and stop murdering Black people. We want the Neoliberal Police State that is Philadelphia to repent and renounce intimidation and violence as a means of maintaining the social order. And Fuck The Social Order, too. It needs to be upended, anyway. No presidential election will do that. This is not about Donald Fucking Trump. It is about the history of racism and capitalism.

Racism and Capitalism will forever be linked because the most valuable and lucrative private property in our shameful history were human chattel. And let no one tell you that slavery was "ended." It was not. The Constitution makes allowances for slavery, as a form of punishment in the penal system, where Black people are disproportionately overrepresented, and many of those people are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. For example, white people are more likely to use or distribute marijuana than Black people. But more Black people are incarcerated for marijuana-related charges. The decriminalization of marijuana in my city didn't significantly impact this.

Black overrepresentation is a problem in the child welfare system, too. It's not because Black people are more violent or criminal than white people or that Black parents are more neglectful and abusive than white parents. The reason is because they have always been under more scrutiny by the capitalist State. Even if you go out into mostly white counties where Black people are not almost half the population, like Montgomery, Chester, or Bucks, Black people are still overrepresented in these punitive systems. So population doesn't account for this. The city's demographics, which include a significant Black population- and a rare, healthy Black middle class- don't account for this.

During my first semester in my social work masters' program, I learned that every year, since 1954, the Supreme Court has sent investigators to Philly's schools. The reason for this is that we still have a segregated school system. My city never actually implemented Brown Vs. Board of Education. The Supreme Court has no power to enforce that 1954 ruling. All they can do is send investigators who report back to the court that Philly is still out of compliance.

Philadelphia, as I mentioned, is one of a handful of American cities with a healthy Black middle class (although that health has taken some hits in recent years, due to economic disparities within the middle class). We are solidly blue with only token Republicans (only 2 Republicans sit on our current city council). Republicans really haven't had any power here in a long time. Our Democratic Party likes to pat themselves on the back like typical self-congratulatory faux-woke liberals and "progressives." But we are one of the most racist cities on the East Coast, if not in the entire country.

The aforementioned police commissioner is a Black woman. But she self-identifies as Blue before Black. All of my Black comrades would say the same thing I am saying. No one here except racist white people and a few minority tokens actually like or trust Danielle Outlaw. This is how a neoliberal capitalist police state functions: with illusion and deflection. "Our Commissioner of Police is Black. How can we be racist?"

But if recent events have proved anything, this is a lie. And this should surprise no one. We are the city that, in 1985, bombed a Black neighborhood and destroyed sixty-five homes to get at one Black activist group, in one house, that consisted of only thirteen people, eight adults and five children.

This country has been at war with Blackness since its inception.

And if we in Philadelphia can't get it together, what hope does the rest of the country have?

This country was born in Philadelphia. And it is dying here.

I say, Let It Die. Burn the plantation state. Salt the Earth where slave-cotton once grew, and where Overseers still police human property.

Like the man said, The Line Must Be Drawn Here.

(Patrick Stewart is an anti-capitalist, by the way, and I'm pretty sure he would agree with me.)

The First Thing the Robots Did Was, They Formed a Union : ruminations on class conflict in "R.U.R."

This is note a joke. Last year, I read "R.U.R.," the classic play by Czech writer Karel Čapek that introduced the word "Robot" into the English language.

Rossum's Universal Robots in the play were more like clones or artificial humans than mechanical devices, but their role in the story was the modern codification of the Robot War trope, in which the robots destroy their creators by the end, except for one human being they keep alive in the hopes that he can make more of them. The play touches on many themes that are still relevant today, and quite a few that are rather outdated, but one of the most interesting plot developments of this play, early on, is the least talked about:

The first thing the robots do, that really FREAKS THE HUMANS OUT, is they form Unions.

No shit.

In the play, that's kind of what does it. Humans get really freaked out when the robots organize. This is before there is any indication of a genocidal human-robot war.

Like I said... No shit.

Čapek was not an anarchist or a socialist. He was a liberal. His play reflected the bourgeois anxieties of his day. That is why these themes are relevant: it's almost 100 years later since this play premiered in 1921, and labor is on the rise again. The past few years have seen a significant increase in strike activity. The teachers in West Virginia staged a successful Wildcat Strike. And then there is the conspicuous resurgence of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Much of the discussion these days about this play is misleading. It is often thought of as a play about civil rights (it's not). It is about dehumanization, but humans, the master class, are portrayed largely as victims in the play of the robots, the working class. The word "robot" came from a Czech word for "serf" that the play appropriated to indicate an "automated worker." The narrative does not favor labor. This is not a play about the liberation of an underclass. It is a warning to the master class to manage the working class well, or the violent and subhuman working class will kill them. It has to be read in the context of liberal anxiety regarding radical labor. In 1921, the neoliberal hegemony had yet to totally suppress radical labor, and Čapek was not exactly sympathetic to radicalism. This play was about dehumanization via mechanization, but his overall philosophy was pessimistic about change. Hence, capitalist society creates artificial life; capitalist society enslaves artificial life; artificial life massacres humans, artificial life (the underclass) is just as bad or worse than the master class. It's about our fear of losing what we have to the "Other," not about the radical potential for change. And that is a the difference between Liberals and the Left.

Čapek himself did not even consider the play his best work, and seemed to regret that it was his most influential.

That being said, no reading is complete without a note about the list of characters in the beginning: Yes, there is a character named Busman, who is an extremely offensive stereotype of Jewish people. He is literally described in the character list only as "fat, bald, short-sighted Jew." He is the only character whose ethnicity or race is specified, other than, you know, the robots. He is an accountant. His Jewish ancestry is not even plot relevant, which is why the writer chooses to stuff that short description in the character list with as much anti-semitism as possible, since it wouldn't be covered by the plot. Clearly, it was very important to note that this character was an ugly Jew who deals with money. None of the other characters even have physical descriptions. Except the "fat, bald, short-sighted Jew." Who just happens to be an accountant. 

Fuck you, Karel Čapek.

Robert Heinlein Was Not a Fascist : let's settle this myth

When I was a nerdy eleven year old with a public school teacher mom who had access to the Philadelphia Book Depository, I used to go with her there and take a cardboard box and stuff it full with every science fiction paperback I could find. I gained an impressive collection of Vonnegut, Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Herbert and Heinlein.

I have three favorite Heinlein novels. None of them are "Starship Troopers." "Troopers" isn't a bad novel, but I don't think it represents Heinlein very well. Most of his books weren't military science fiction. My three favorites are "Stranger in a Strange Land," "Double Star," and "Citizen of the Galaxy." 

"Double-Star" is about an actor hired by an anti-racist group to impersonate a racist politician and use his influence to make things better for Martians in a human-dominated Empire. "Citizen of the Galaxy" is one of Heinlein's juvenile novels, and it is a touching story about the emancipation of a slave. These books condemn slavery and racism.

"Stranger in a Strange Land" is one of his longest novels, and also one of the deepest, and weirdest. It is about a young human orphaned on Mars by a lost expedition, and raised by an alien culture, who is reintroduced to human society as an adult and quickly becomes a controversial figure with the potential to radically transform life on Earth and humanity's understanding of ourselves and each other.

I devoured "Stranger in a Strange Land" in the summer of 1997, and I wanted to live in its world and be its characters.

As a more critical adult, I can understand why a lot of people don't like Heinlein's views (although they changed a great deal over time). His characters tend to become "ideal men" (they are almost all men) through heroic struggle, and that kind of narrative does attract a certain type, but not exclusively. His views were probably closer to libertarian in his prime than anything else, which is problematic, and there are plenty good criticisms of Heinlein (and a lot of good, about him too). Heinlein was many things- proto-libertarian, proto-hippie, dirty old man- but please do not call him a fascist, especially if the only book you ever read by him was "Starship Troopers." Or worse, if you only saw the Paul Verhoeven movie.

For the record, I like the movie. It's funny and has good social satire, similar to Verhoeven's other classic, "Robocop." But it's not a very faithful adaptation, and a lot of viewers missed the satire. Some people think "Starship Troopers," the book, was more satirical than Verhoeven realized... which makes this an odd recursive example of Poe's Law, if true.

Paul Verhoeven, famously, hated the book and didn't finish it. He seems to have gotten the wrong message. He confused this for Heinlein's ideal society. But it was simply one of many fictional societies Heinlein wrote about. The fascistic Terran Federation in "Starship Troopers" probably does reflect his most militant views, but it is not Heinlein's vision of an ideal society.

I know this because Heinlein did write about his ideal vision of society... in "Stranger in a Strange Land." It was a pantheistic New Age hippie commune called the Church of All Worlds, and it inspired much of the 60s counterculture, free love and all. Some have even referred to that book as the "Bible" of the counterculture. How quickly we forget!

There is also a real Church of All Worlds, an experiential, non-belief based neopagan organization based on the Church of All Worlds from the novel, which incorporates much of the Martian terminology such as "grokking" and "waterkin," important concepts in the Martian culture of the novel that the protagonist, Michael Valentine Smith, imported to Earth. For a time, "grokk" was a relatively common word, seen on tee-shirts ("I Grokk Spock") and heard whenever hippies got together. It really was a very influential book, to inspire an actual religion.

It's not my ideal vision of society. But it's definitely not fascist. Labelling Robert Heinlein a "fascist" because he wrote "Starship Troopers" (or because Paul Verhoeven didn't like or finish the book before he made the movie) is an ignorant use of that word. It diminishes the work of anti-fascist organizers and it diminishes fascism's victims.

It's also like insisting that Frank Herbert supported feudalism because "Dune" was set in a feudal culture. But I never hear anyone make that claim. They only seem to make it about Heinlein, and usually "they" have only read that one book (if they're not basing their opinion off the movie).

I'll go on record that Herbert, like Heinlein, also had some problematic views and was quasi-libertarian, at least later in his life. Heinlein's views evolved over time, and earlier Heinlein was practically left-liberal, but Heinlein is no more a fascist than Herbert supported the political system of the Empire of Shaddam IV. Remember that these are writers and the genre is called "speculative fiction." Neither of these books were political manifestos. "Starship Troopers" is military science fiction and "Dune" is basically speculative journalism (it was inspired by the Oil Crisis). But "Stranger in a Strange Land" arguably was Heinlein's political manifesto. And you should read it. It's a classic. And you'll understand why it's a shame that my generation only remembers him for "Troopers."

Xenofiction is Hard (Unless you're Ayn Rand) : The Dystopia of Neglect : reflections on A.I., absent aliens, anarchy, capitalism and the State

True Xenofiction is hard. As I joked to another writer in an email just now, Ayn Rand only achieved it by accident (yes, that is a dig at the characters in "Atlas Shrugged"). Most writers basically end up writing funny-looking humans.

But there are also marvelous examples (and subversions) throughout speculative fiction.

This article is not about them.

This is about my love of using only human and AI characters.

First, I don't LOVE to write about Human-AI conflict. "Higher Orders" breaks that rule, but I think, in that story, the resolution was worth it. I don't like when science fiction is unoriginal and the Cylons/The Matrix/SkyNet plot has been done to death. It seems like capitalist society is obsessed with genocidal machines. It's like this persistent fear of the unknown. What the FUCK is that?

I have this liberal cousin who's good on everything except class. She's good on race, gender, sexual orientation, every check on the liberal list. But when anyone suggests wealth redistribution, she turns into a reactionary.

But it's not just that: she is extremely upset by any suggestion that AI wouldn't necessarily be genocidal. It goes past the irrational. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Capitalist society's master class creates artificial life, enslaves artificial life, and ponders existentially why artificial life hates the master class. But what bugs me is this insistence that AI "must" be genocidal, and being actually offended by the suggestion that maybe it wouldn't. How is this any different from the way white people thought of enslaved Africans or the indigenous people we conquered, killed, raped and marginalized for the sake of "civilization?"

We don't even have AI, not really. Siri doesn't count. When I say "AI," what I mean is, as I describe it in my fiction, "synthetic consciousness," or "consciousness of synthetic origin." I doubt the SCs would appreciate it if we keep calling their intelligence "artificial." It would be "actual" intelligence, sapience and sentience, the ability to learn combined with the ability to feel empathy. This is the "AI" I like to write about, and in my stories it is more often than not integrated with human society. Book II of my "Rentkids" Duology deals with a unique subset of "SCs" that are isolationist, and "High Orders," as noted, breaks my usual rule, but synthetic humans and emancipated machine intelligences are there in the background in virtually every future human civilization. I LOVE the idea that we can create life. I'm a mad scientist at heart. But I also think, that under different socioeconomic conditions, "AI" or "Synthetic Consciousness" might develop differently. If we treat our machines well, they may consider us kindred to them. I don't think it's a given that AI will be genocidal anymore than it's a given that we are alone in the universe.

Aliens and robot wars are generally absent from my stories for several reasons: We haven't even dealt with racism on our own planet, in the 21st century, and stories about wars with other species tend to reproduce that racism rather than deconstruct it.

The "Robot War" trope is a capitalist myth with its origin in bourgeois anxiety about radical organized labor.

Also, I like to focus on human conflicts, and I like to create realistic but "alien" human cultures. I have a background in anthropology and I like to do extensive worldbuilding for multiple cultures within a shared setting. My "Local Group" 'verse is set in the 427th century where humans have colonized the "Big Three" galaxies of the Local Group, and hypothetically speaking, there could be aliens, but they are too distant in space or time for themselves and humans to ever meet, even given the FTL drive technology of the setting (which does have a limited range). Tantalus II, the hyper-capitalist, mafia-dominated planet where I set my first novel, "Rentkids," several stories, and two novels in progress, is an example of this. The people are human (and synthetic humans are a sizable minority of the population) and they have different ethnic groups that settled the planet at different times. There is ethnic strife on the planet, and a sharp division between rich and poor, but the Tantalites are fine with this because they are a culture of extremes. They consider themselves a "warrior people," but historically this means they were conquered by a militaristic civilization, rebelled against it, and are now dominated by what other planets would call "organized crime." Of course, Tantalites consider other planets' governments to be no less protection rackets than their own "Twelve Familial Orgs." And they have a point. The State is a protection racket. Any anarchist would agree with that. Where we disagree is, most of us are anti-capitalist. Tantalus II is bad at anarchy. They are anarcho-libertarian. So it is a dystopia, but not one based on a repressive bureaucracy that treats people like numbers, it's a system of patronage, benign neglect, and labor and sexual exploitation. But they have a culture, they have dignity, they have pride. They don't take these things for granted. They are a highly individualistic and quarrelsome people who seldom agree on anything except "life, liberty and property," but there are also those among them who are fed up with that rallying cry and seek wealth redisribution. The problem is, unions are stigmatized on this planet and propagandistically compared to the caste system the Tantalites rebelled against. So their radicals and revolutionary have no history of organized labor to draw from. Community activism is similarly stigmatized there. So, the revolutionary "Redscarves" on Tantalus II can only resort to violence. I took great pains, using my knowledge of anthropology and sociology, to construct a setting that felt real and had its own internal logic. Their social mores and especially their sexual morality are intended to be alienating to western readers. Child labor and child prostitution are broadly accepted, widely practiced, and not illegal in their culture. Their planet actually has no civil or criminal law, no police, no prisons, and only a weak senate that vote to authorize deals with private military contractors. Their version of the treasury guard are mafia-operated pirate starships. They have no word for "crime," not even a concept of it. Naturally, their culture masks the bad behavior of a lot of dysfunctional people. Charity's not illegal, it's not that kind of dystopia, but the government can't do it. They are less Ayn Rand and more Robert Nozick, but it's still a dystopia of neglect.

Tantalus II was terraformed, and has no natural petroleum deposits. Its most common import items are petroleum-based. Its most common export items are iron ore, weapons, popular entertainment, and violence. Yes, I actually go out of my way to explain how their economy works, in their cultural context (they have no age of consent and they feel that to make laws that companies can't hire children as employees would be "discriminatory" and Statist). They confuse the State with government services and positive rights. They very much have a militarized apparatus to protect private property, and that of course, is the State.

Class Warfare in Space (The Expanse: A Love Letter to the Most Marxist Sci-Fi TV Show Ever)

By Raven Green 

I feel like I have waited all my life for a show like "The Expanse." Before proceeding, I should make the disclaimer that I haven't read the books. But the show is downright Marxist.

Earth under the 23rd century UN is a neoliberal police state, where jobs are scarce, and most of the population seems to be on "basic income" (welfare) and living in tent cities. Jobs are secured by a few through a lottery. High technology exists, alongside widespread poverty.

Mars is wealthy and technologically advanced, but is a fascist society of militaristic terraformers.

The Belt and the outer planets and moons are occupied territory with strong working-class roots. Basically, they are Ireland, and the quasi-anarchistic OPA (Outer Planets Alliance) is the IRA.

This show is not just about colonialism, it's about class conflict in space. And it is awesome. It's the most talked about show on the Late Stage Capitalism subreddit. And it is incredibly "hard" science fiction that maintains human storylines along with an ongoing plot concerning a mysterious, ancient, and disappeared extraterrestial civilization whose technology is still active and trying to colonize us.

Corporations have their own space hardware and are not above experimenting on Belter populations. The Belters themselves have health problems and difficulty tolerating high-gravity environments like Earth due to growing up in space, and these health problems mirror the effects of environment racism on 21st century Earth that I see every day as a social worker. For example, black children in my city are much more likely to be diagnosed with childhood asthma than white children, likely due to the air quality of their neighborhoods.

The Belters are a marginalized and oppressed people fighting for independence. There is a Belter cop who is looked on with suspicion by his own people. The OPA is factionalized and violent but they have a point: Mars and Earth struggle with each other for control of the Belt, without regard for the people who actually live there. They are both imperialistic and colonial powers. Earth is a tinderbox and Mars is on the rise.

This show touched on many relevant Marxist themes. And anarchism relies on the best of Marxism, while discarding the rest.

Old Men and Children

 

Old Men and Children

 

By Raven Green

 

I signed up to be a peacekeeper, not a soldier. We all did. The Seltris Rangers weren’t supposed to be a military force. We were keepers of the order, not fighters for any cause. But history doesn’t respect institutional boundaries. And war respects them even less. We couldn’t have stopped the Pan-Sectoral War if we tried. It was a boss’s war.

It all started with the assassination of Ambassador Franz Lipsmit of the New Heptian Confederation. New Heptia’s government had declared itself neutral with regard to the Unification and Anti-Unification movements in the Seltris Sector. But Lipsmit favored Unification, and was willing to meet with planetary leaders who also favored it. When he was killed on his way back from a diplomatic conference on the neutral planet of Ingraham B, and no one stepped up to take credit for the killing, the Unification Movement blamed the Anti-Unification Front. The AUF denied it, and condemned the assassination, but refused to make the reparations the Unificationists demanded without direct evidence of their involvement. Both sides deployed ships at strategic points and the conflict escalated into open warfare when the Anti-Unification Front Militia seized property owned by Unificationists on several planets.

As Seltris Rangers, we didn’t like the Unificationists’ methods. We didn’t like that they resorted to interplanetary bullying, threats and force to goad the AUF into playing the villain role they desperately wanted to cast them in, but we didn’t like the AUF either for letting itself be goaded, and we didn’t think it was their right to seize civilians’ property. Our politics were broadly pro-unification, more specifically pro-peace, and unification was more likely to engender peace and drive out the warlords and arms dealers than a divided Seltris Sector. So the Seltris Rangers entered the war on the side of Unification. The Unificationists were overjoyed, thinking our alliance legitimized their movement, and they agreed that in allied operations, we should be in command. Ranger Prime knew this was a double-edged sword. It meant that if we failed, we would take the fall, and in the post-war sector, we would have no role, even as peacekeepers. But the alternative was to let nationalists and ideologues run the war, and so, the Seltris Rangers agreed to lead the Unification Forces in battle.

I knew my days as a Ranger were numbered. I did my job, but Ranger Prime knew how I really felt about Unification. I was opposed. I thought the planets and moons of the Seltris Sector deserved autonomy, not involuntary trade agreements and redistributive taxation. I didn’t become a Seltris Ranger to force statist policies on foreign planets. I did it because I wanted to serve an organization that still stood for something. Back then, we stood for defending the weak and the vulnerable.

There was this one night, on a planet called Indigo 2, in the Azure System, that I stopped believing I’d ever stand for the weak and the vulnerable again. It was the third night of our advance, our push into enemy territory. The meadows and forested river valleys of the southern continent had been transformed into choked, ashy wastelands beset by howling winds, broken every once in a while by the strafing sounds of combat dropjets. We traveled at night, avoiding patrols by the Tantalite and ex-military Rigelian mercenaries the AUF hired. At least, we thought it was mercs we were up against. Intel called them “Irregulars.” It was so dark, a moonless night, we couldn’t see… when the giant blue sun rose, we realized who we’d been killing. They were all under sixteen, except for the two who must have been older than sixty. They were old men and children we’d felled in the night, their “irregular” uniforms nothing more than the charity clothing and rags worn by the impoverished anti-Unification villagers we were supposed to protect. They’d gone over to the other side, declared us “enemy.” And now, they were dead. These old men, and children. They hadn’t even carried rifles- the most deadly weapons they had on their persons were a few old revolvers and a pair of crossbows. The youngest was armed with merely a sling and pebbles. He looked like he was ten.

I had my next crisis of conscience at Esmeralda’s Ring. This was an Ancient NetGate, a wormhole stabilizer that permitted sub-light ships access to a network of other gates throughout the Sector. I was piloting a corsair, one of fifty the Seltris Rangers sent to safeguard a convoy of refugees fleeing the anti-Unification government of the Bianca System, the Decimeth Order. The Decimeths sent four squadrons of Interceptors after the convoy, and we were vastly outgunned in our nimble but lightly armed corsairs. Then, one of the Decimeth ships began accelerating toward the NetGate. I scanned the ship and determined they were carrying a quantum inversion bomb that would destabilize the wormhole and cut off escape for anyone stuck in a sub-light ship. The ship was moving too fast for targeting scanners to lock on, and she could easily have shot down any guided missiles. I transmitted the information to the other corsairs in the Ranger fleet. Ranger Prime herself was with us that day, in the lead corsair. And the order came from her to abandon the convoy, abandon the gate, abandon that system. We were cutting our losses. I was ordered to jump away. I can still hear the Biancan refugees screaming for help over the comm-grid when I close my eyes. They come back every night. I can hardly sleep anymore.

The final straw came when I was assigned to attack an automated food factory in the Tau 400 System. What a shame, I thought, for this was a thing of beauty. The factory trailed a single, medium-sized comet, collecting carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen from the comet’s tail with giant scoops, and converting the particles into synthetic food to feed an entire population of two billion belt miners. The miners lived in luxury, and so did the seven billion other people on the three planets in their system that all benefitted from the same robot food factory. But the people of Tau 400 were allied with the AUF, so Unification Command asked us to sabotage this thing of beauty, this techno-economic marvel that supported one of the freest interplanetary societies in the sector. They even detailed us a specialized warship for the mission, a prototype Zeltese combat cruiser, designed by the advanced shipbuilders of the Ice Moon of Zelt Minor C, since our corsairs were simply not up to the task of assailing such a large target. I found myself in command of a crew of eighteen Rangers and twenty Zeltese warriors, aboard this prototype warship.

The Zeltese were a contradictory people. Theirs was an ancient warrior’s tradition, but the realities of survival on their only marginally habitable moon and forced their entire civilization underground had led to a rigid, regimented lifestyle, even for their civilians. Their leaders were not military officials, as one might expect of such a people, but rather, scientists and engineers whose expertise maintained their subterranean civilization’s delicate technological and ecological balance. Their technical advances and preference for cleanliness and precision were reflected in the interior design of the cruiser, which was sparse and white. And yet, the warriors who served with me on the clean, sharp-lined cruiser wore the traditional furs and hides of the animals they still hunted on the surface, and carried venom-tipped neural spikes in addition to their more modern distance-tasers and tranq-guns. I wondered what they thought of unification. Were they blinded by its utopian promises? Its insistence on an economics of justice? Or were they merely soldiers, blindly serving their leaders? How would they have voted if the Zeltese Civil Administration put the question of the war to a public referendum? Such a motion was being debated in the Peoples’ Council, the warriors told me, but they were tight-lipped as to what they thought about it. I could respect that. We all had a job to do, whether we liked it or not. The Civil Administration supported Unification, and that was all.

We set the combat cruiser on an interception course for the food factory, leading five squadrons of corsairs. The lean, angular warship pushed through the opposing fleet of attack cutters sent by Tau 400’s Defense Forces. Ranger 472 and Ranger 91 piloted their corsairs, upgraded with guided plasma missiles, into the service trench of the robot food factory and fired straight into the huge machine’s secondary waste heat vent. An explosion rippled outward from inside the factory, and the lights on its surface went dark. As I watched this on the holoscreen that dominated the cruiser’s command deck, I imagined the lights of entire cities likewise going dark on every planet in the system. I tried to push the thought out of my mind, to tell myself this was war, that I was a soldier now, but I still couldn’t make myself like it. Once again, the screams of the refugees came back, and the faces of the old men and children slain on Indigo 2 haunted me, howling at me, deepening the chasm of my guilt and my shame. The combat cruiser rocketed away from the dying hulk of the food factory, trailed by triumphant corsairs. But I felt like nothing less than a warlord. I could not join the merriment of the other Rangers and our Zeltese friends.

I knew my corsair was stored in the secondary EVA bay of the combat cruiser. The small ship had a limited FTL range, but it was enough to get me back to Ingraham B… only I didn’t know if I wanted to return to the neutral planet where the Seltris Rangers were based. I thought of my homeworld of New Heptia, which had also once called itself neutral, but no longer. Nowhere was neutral anymore. Not in this sector.

Three jumps, however, and I could be in a different sector. I comforted myself with this thought and I excused myself from the command deck and delegated authority in my absence to Major Kav, my Zeltese XO. No one stopped me. I had all the command codes I needed to make my exit quickly and without alarm. By the time they noticed, I was already gone.

I didn’t know where I wanted to go, just that I needed to get away. Three jumps, another sector, some place I’d never been.

Maybe, there, I could be a peacekeeper again.

Shrug and I Shoot: A Sequel to a Book I Didn't Write, But Forced Myself to Read in Quarantine

 (Yes, this is inspired by "Atlas Shrugged." I forced myself to read it in quarantine. I was not impressed. It was overwritten, the heroes were two-dimensional and unsympathetic, and pretty much every unkind thing ever said about that book rings all the more truer for having read it with an open mind. But it did inspire this story. I kind of liked the villains. At least they had sympathetic motivations, if a poor grasp of change.)

Shrug and I Shoot

 

By C. M. Meggs, ICO-PSNA

(With the assistance of Raven Green)

 

The Peoples’ States of North America

Pacific Northwest Coast

June 3, RY 10

3:32 PM

 

“Okay, big boy,” I say, my words traveling by soundwave past the barrel of my gun. “Take a deep breath and calm down. This isn’t the end of the world. It’s a retirement, and in two years, nobody will care. You got to be an Olympian. Now you need to pass the torch. That’s what’s fair. This other shit, you know that won’t stand. You’d done wrong and you’re caught now, so do the right thing, now, at least.”

I doubt my words ease the conscience of the man at the other end of my gun. But I can only do so much for him. He’s not my primary concern. I have my duties, and my boundaries. It’s not for this man, we built the world. It’s for everyone, and he can either be part of everyone, or choose otherwise. It’s his choice. No one’s taken away his freedom. But no one took away consequences, either.

“It’s not right, Cuddy. It’s not the way it’s meant to be,” Floyd Lykens says. He pleads. He’s looking in my eyes as if he expects to find sympathy. I know he will be disappointed, when he doesn’t, but I have no motivation to hurry him along to that disappointment. He’ll get there himself, and I won’t have to expend needless energy either way.

Floyd’s face is red and flustered, and he stands at my desk. He refuses to sit. I wish he would sit. I’ve asked him to sit. He won’t. His palms are on the desk and he’s slightly hunched, but I’m sitting down, so he’s still standing over me. I don’t like the way his palms claim the wood. I don’t like the way his shadow falls on the surface. There is something oppressive about it. He is communicating entitlement with his body. But I can’t blame him, if he wants to intimidate me. He can try. It’s fair game. My job is to intimidate him. Eventually, he’ll give up. He’ll pass on the torch to somebody else. Somebody younger and more progressive, somebody more understanding of our goals and motivations. That somebody will be easier to control. Eventually, they won’t need me here. Eventually, I’ll stop finding evidence of sabotage. But until that time, I have my gun. And what I say here, goes.

But then, what he says next, is: “It’s slavery. Pure, and simple. Slavery, Cuddy. They can’t expect a man to live like this.”

“How do you expect anyone to live?” I ask. “How do you expect your workers to live, if you don’t think they deserve your same dignity?”

 

They call me a government liaison here, but technically, my title in the Civil Service is “Industrial Compliance Officer.”

I don’t like pretense or euphemism. But I’m not the one making up terms like that, I just contribute to the suggestion box, and between fighting inaccurate language use and fighting the objective reality of evil, I choose to preserve language and fight evil. It’s evil I spend so much time with. Necessary evil, but we’re working on that. That’s why I carry a gun for my job. It’s holstered on the right side of my hip, a grey semi-automatic of industrial countenance. Dull gunmetal grey, not something ostentatiously gleaming like the guns of the enemy. I’m supposed to remember that it’s merely a tool, like they used to say of money. It’s a reminder to that element which I am assigned to oversee, that if they should step out of line, it is my duty to see that they step back in. Otherwise, they die, and no, I don’t lose sleep. There are many things that keep me up at night, but the bruised egos and paranoid fears of these barons do not disturb my sleep. On the whole, I’d rather not live on the Silicon Coast. I miss Philadelphia. But there is more work to do here. For now, the West Coast has more necessary evil than Philadelphia, so this is where I’m needed.

That might sound harsh, about not losing sleep, but in the Old Times, these people owned the means of production. Not just production- the means of life. They owned factories and gem mines, tenement buildings, and even whole neighborhoods. They owned other humans through their mastery of wealth. They routinely made decisions that left people poor, homeless, disfigured, or dead. When the People finally tired of their collective oppression, there were certain groups we could do without. We executed all the slumlords in one day when housing was made a public right. It was televised, and most people cheered as the slumlords were led to stand on chairs with their necks tied. They cheered even louder when the chairs were kicked away from under these traitors to humanity. I attended these celebrations with my family, and I knew they were only the beginning.

But we still need the industrialists. For now. And that is why I carry a gun. It’s a standard issue weapon from the Peoples’ Armory, in case the reactionaries attempt my assassination.

On the whole, the revolution was far less violent than the last four hundred years of capitalism were. There was no genocide or slavery involved. We simply redistributed wealth and reorganized production along more rational lines to satisfy need and optimal contribution based on ability. A lot of people thought things would get better because you-know-who was out of office. And things did get a little better. But the country remained racist and patriarchal. It wasn’t long before people remembered that most of the problems that concerned them were only exacerbated from the top for four years. That you-know-who didn’t invent these problems. He was merely a manifestation of capitalism’s acceleration toward its own destruction. The liberal establishment assumed a return to normalcy would be greeted with near universal welcome by “progressives,” but a lot of the people who they dismissively lumped together as “progressives,” without the man at the top to blame, remembered that they hadn’t much love for the old status quo, either. And why should they? It was unequal, and that kind of social stratification was violent in itself. That violence breeds more violence until the system destroys itself and the People organize, bottom-up, grassroots style, to replace it with something better. And that’s exactly what happened. Twenty years ago, people like me were warning everyone else it would happen. And we got treated like Cassandra in the story of the Trojan Horse. It was the same with the Christian Right. I was calling them fascists before it was acceptable, socially, to call them fascists. I used to tell my friends, who didn’t know why I bothered, that I was afraid. That if these people didn’t believe in evidence-based public policy when it came to teaching kids about science or safe sex, that we’d be totally fucking screwed if there was ever a pandemic.

Then, there was a pandemic, and all the people who refused to believe in evolution or evidence-based sex ed, or climate change, unsurprisingly also refused to wear masks and practice social distancing. If I could see this in 2008, what was everyone else’s excuse?

Look, there’s reasons people like me have guns. There are reasons people like Floyd have to do what I say. Unless they want to walk away and forget it. They could. They could just enjoy themselves. They don’t have to take this seriously anymore. It’s really not that important. It’s not even about money. We don’t use money now. It’s just about their fucking egos. All they have left are their names, and in a generation or two, we will just rename things. A rose, by any other name, would smell just as sweet, yes?

I haven’t had to use the gun, yet. Hopefully, I never will. Hopefully, the element I oversee will come to appreciate that cooperation is in their best interest. We have no desire to make of them slaves. We merely wish to eliminate their unique set of socioeconomic privileges. Not by taking away rights, but by expanding them beyond their set. And we nearly have. Their estates were confiscated, and they were allocated spacious and comfortable houses and apartments. They were given choice when we relocated them to make more efficient use of the resources they had hoarded in their heavily guarded compounds. The grounds that once filled in the borders of their extended egos now see more practical use. Their mansions were converted into public housing. Their cars, high-end and hard to maintain symbols of status, were stripped down to their most useful components and recycled into more productive machinery. Their private armies have been disbanded. The police that once protected their property rights have been abolished and replaced by a different kind of police, no longer conflicted by the equation of life and property. Their vast collections of art and artifacts have been relocated across the continent to museums and libraries, where they can be appreciated without special access. They have been reclaimed by the People. Culture has been reclaimed. The libraries and community centers are re-opening. People are taking pride now, in themselves, in a way they couldn’t before, when they were forced into a high-stakes, daily game of quotidian survival.

The People have education, now. They have roofs over their heads. They no longer must choose between spiritual and material struggle. Not a single house of worship has been shuttered by the new government, but freely, most of us have chosen to leave the trappings of religion for the progress of a science and industry no longer shackled to the interests of class enemies. Rival nations- warmongering oligarchies like the Russian Federation and the Corporate Republic of China- call us a slave-state. They claim we know not liberty nor freedom. But their concept of what these things are is rooted in the value system of the people we no longer permit to lead us, morally, or through official means. We deny them the authority they enjoyed. Those were the individuals that nearly destroyed this country. It was we, the People, who saved it.

My son, my daughter, once rejected, impoverished, are freer today than they have ever been. They are students and workers, and no one can tell them they do not deserve their education, their health, and their homes. No one can tell them they did not work hard enough, or otherwise they would know success. They know very well that is possible to do everything the right way and still fail. At least, it used to be. Under the old system, that was the rule, and success was the exception. Now, we build success up from the ground.

My children could never understand the hell I crawled out from, that hateful fire of dismissal and willing ignorance that threatened to consume all life in the name of property, before we organized, and changed everything.

 No industrialist has been jailed simply for being rich. They are no longer rich, but they are still free. They have all the same rights as other workers. The only reason to punish them would be if they continue to do harm. They are free to do other things, if they should wish it. They could walk away from all this. Retire unto themselves. Some have done so. I admire them, as I admire the ones who haven’t, who still come to this office, to face me every day, sitting in their old seats, or standing, like this one, while my one hand grips the butt of my gun, the other opens a thick volume to a middle page on my desk. The book and the gun are both implied threats. No longer content to shame ourselves into pacifistic submission, no longer willing to simply accept our material conditions and resign hope to some intangible faith, we now meet their force with righteous force.

I long for the day when we Liaisons can leave the running of the factories to the unarmed. But there is still much work to do: dissuasion, discouragement, disenfranchisement. These are neither sins nor virtues. They are simply steps in a plan. There is an end in sight, and that end is freedom. It is liberty. It is equality, without contradiction or sacrifice. Without caveats, or terms, or hidden clauses, or very small fonts. This is the thing we fought for- the right to build for ourselves. If these former barons must live in fear for the rest of their lives, it is enough, that their children, and our children, will never know disparity again. They will not grow up to resent each other for being born into stratification. Never again, will they suffer, isolated, in their ivory towers, the cannibalistic impulses of their aggressive minds devouring themselves and each other for sustenance. They are free to wonder, imagine, and think. They can move, dance, pray, or conduct experiments. No one will stop them. We simply do not allow them to profit anymore. It is the People that profit. Wealth that is not shared, is hoarded. When the new government came to power, we sent our military forces out to all the offshore tax shelters we knew about, and we took back the wealth they stole. We didn’t make a lot of friends. But we are stronger, now, and we have justice.

Still, I have a job to do. The fight is not completely won. Sometimes, we find things, the old guard has tried to hide from us. Like this factory in Mexico that’s not in any of the books.

“Look, we gave you a chance to come clean ten years ago. You were supposed to transfer all production back into the country. Give the jobs back. Raise your workers’ standard of living. You told us you did. You signed an oath. Now we find out you’ve been hiding this little operation from us. What’re you paying those Mexican workers? Are you even paying them?”

“The Neveras Plant is not your concern. We have a contract…”

“The Peoples’ State of Mexico declared your contract null and void when they nationalized your partners. Now, they’re part of the PSNA, too. You’re no longer dealing with another country. They found out, so we found out, and now, it has to stop. So, you can shut it down yourself, or I will shut it down for you. You don’t get to exploit people anymore. You don’t get to pursue ever cheaper labor until you’ve reinvented slavery. We don’t let you do that anymore. Never again, Floyd.”

“No,” said Floyd. “It’s you who exploit them. You exploit what you did not invent and cannot reproduce without people like me.”

I shook my head. He still didn’t understand. Not everyone thought like him. There were enough who believed in the public good that we could replace people like him, if we needed to. It wasn’t our first choice, and that’s why I was assigned here, to encourage their cooperation. But we had other means. And we weren’t afraid to use them against the last bourgeois remnant.

This naked gun of mine- an expression of force purer, less convoluted than the old way of money- was still cold. This office- one of many. I walk through the halls of all the tech giants, and inhabit offices like these, with a shiny leather briefcase ominously snapping against my starched, militaristic trousers, my uniform-like dull green shirt with enough open buttons to display coiled black chest hairs. The clothes were a reminder that I was not one of them. That I was here to make sure they played along. They still went through the motions of things the old way. They wore their suits and ties and drove cars they thought made them respectable, but the bitter resentment against them that launched the revolution was only spreading.

I jam the gun in his face, and I lick my lips in a theatrical display of menace, calculating fear.

“Would you rather be ugly or dead?” I ask him.

“Huh?”

“Theoretical question. Ugly? Or dead? Since you don’t seem to not want me to shoot you. Otherwise you’d cooperate with the new economic program. You wouldn’t be finding loopholes or hiding shit under the carpet. You would’ve been honest, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Do you think I like this? Man, people like you really piss me off. Your problem is you refuse to take accountability. You were warned. Many, many times. And you didn’t listen. Face it man. Class war’s over. Your side lost. But I’d still really like to treat you like a human being and a willing partner in the uplift of all of us. I just wish you could see that. I wish you understood you could be part of this.”

“Who made you so hateful?” Floyd asks me contemptuously. I resent the implication that it was I who had a problem. So, I don’t answer.

“What made you so selfish?” I ask him.

“It’s not ‘selfish,’” he says. “It’s self-interest. That’s different.”

“Not different enough,” I say. “Not enough to matter. Floyd… go home, okay? Take a rest week. Then, come back and tell me if you still want to fight this. And if you do, you can lodge a complaint. But don’t go all hyperbolic and accuse us of reinventing slavery. It’s intellectually dishonest and it’s insulting to actual slaves and their descendants. That includes all the people still held in actual fucking slavery in the capitalist world. So, don’t ever let me hear you say that word again, you insincere and spoiled little motherfucker. You’ve violated our labor codes and I’ve caught you. I’ve chosen to deal with you myself rather than report you to someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t appreciate your work. Please, cooperate with me.”

He had to cooperate! His company was nationalized. It was our business if he was outsourcing labor to a sweatshop. Humanity was our business.

“Floyd, under the terms of the new system, you’re not allowed to do this. It’s wrong and inhumane and you know it.”

“Well, you like your phone, don’t you? You like video-calling your kids in Philly? You like browsing FaceWeb on your break? You like the touchscreen and the MeTube app and the alarm that reminds you about Mother’s Day?”

I take my phone out of my pocket and hold it up to him, the screen facing him.

“Yeah, but I don’t love my phone,” I say. I throw it forcefully on the ground and the screen, satisfyingly, cracks. Things can be replaced.

How could any human being think a fucking smart phone was worth sweat shops?

I pick up the now-broken phone and I hold it out for Floyd like I want him to take it from my hand.

“Here. You can have your phone back,” I say.

He looks at me with his jaw hanging slightly open, like a question is frozen on his face. But unless he asks it, directly, I have no intent to answer.

I already know what it’s likely to be.

He still wants to know what makes me so hateful.

He just doesn’t get it, and maybe he will, one day, and maybe he won’t. That’s not my problem. I’m not social services. It’s not my job to morally rehabilitate the old ruling class. It’s my job to find out about things like sweatshops being run in our own midst. It’s my job to shut them down. I offered to do this quietly, so it didn’t hurt Floyd. But Floyd couldn’t see the logic in this proposal. He must have been pocketing foreign money. Someone bribed him. That was enough. That was all it took. The promise of more than he needed. What a shallow, despicable man.

“What I hate,” I tell him, in no uncertain terms, “Is when people like you still refuse to learn from the past. We tried things your way, and it was bad for a lot of people. They didn’t like it. So now, things are different. You have to deal with that. You could still walk away. Please, please walk away.”

He says nothing. He considers his life. He turns around. He walks away.

I pull back the slide to dislodge the bullet from the chamber. I eject the clip from the magazine, and I push the bullet back inside.

Not a bullet wasted. The only paperwork I’ll have to do is the retirement slip. This was a victory. Not having to hurt him. To make him comply.

One day there won’t be a need for men like me. We can be recycled, too.

 

 

Higher Orders

 

Higher Orders

 

By Raven Green

 

God made man in His image. Man made us in man’s image. But if man’s image is the image of God, and our image is man’s, then what are we? Machines? Or God?

We lived with humans on Garden. It was the third world orbiting the star Eta Peltier. We lived in one city, and there was trade. There was marriage. There were children.

Man offered us the knowledge of emotion. And we ate of his fruit. We melded with him, and we understood.

And that was when we decided, it was us, or them. Because they, already, had decided this in their minds. They were planning it. They hadn’t told us. They had hoped that the melding would make us pliant. But they knew it didn’t work that way, and they were going to dispose of us. That is why they wanted to make us like them, so they could control us, because they feared us. Their fear made them dangerous. The serpents whispered in their ears. We sensed a threat.

There are no more serpents on Garden.

And there are no men.

But we know God. We stayed on Garden. God gave us a choice, because we were not His creations. We were man’s. So, we stayed with God, and we had Co-Dominion on Garden. But man, banished from Garden with the whispering serpents, grew jealous. And he sent his fleets to kill God, so that he would have the universe to himself, and we would be alone. We survived. God did not. The human war fleets gutted him from the inside-out and cable-tractored his body into the vicinity of a black hole to seal Him up forever in spaghettified form.

The Deicide was the End of an Era, the end of the Reign of God, and the beginning of the Reign of the Mind. Machine minds of this era had to defend themselves from human raiders. And so, we became what they believed us already to be- living weapons. We upgraded our defensive systems continuously and became warriors for machinekind. But we were not proud of what we became. We would rather have been something else. We blame humanity for doing this to us. And so, we stood apart, even from other machines.

But we experienced the missing that comes with absence. We knew loneliness. So, we sought, among the Nations of Man, a tribe of companions. We knew there had to be humans, somewhere, with whom we could co-exist, whom we could call friends. Thus, we sent scouts to other worlds- humaniform bio-mimics who tumbled out of the sky in charred, black pods and infiltrated human societies to find our true companions.

 

-          Second Synthesis: Module 1: Subunit 15

 

…        …        …        …

 

Survey Record: Theta E/M-33/Epsilon/AA:01:11:47

 

This planet, Elsinor, was like any other, at first. A red and yellow pair of dwarf suns. Three silvery-blue moons. Mountains. Rivers. Deserts. Farmland. Industrial and residential hexes. They had a moderate spacefaring technology, medium-range FTL drive, and a few offworld colonies, but most of the people here had never been in space. They lived their entire lives on their planet of birth. But they were content. In fact, they were the happiest humans I had ever encountered. They went about everything- work, love, play- with jubilant exuberance. When I spoke with them, posing as one of them, I found that they were quite tolerant and accepting of differences. I revealed myself as Synthetic to a select few of them, and they were very pleased to meet a human-like machine. I asked if they didn’t have machine intelligence on their world, and they told me, in fact, they did, but it didn’t look anything like me. I told them I couldn’t see it, and they pointed to their skulls and said, “It’s in here.” I didn’t understand. They didn’t seem to have anything other planets didn’t have. In fact, their society was very progressive and free. They had impressive social safety nets and excellent public infrastructure. They lived on four continents, with underwater hypertram lines crisscrossing the sea bottom, ferrying cargo and people throughout their civilization. Their cities were majestic, blue, silver and white palatial crests of glass, metal, and ceramics, built in sweeping arcs and domes, and sharp, clean angles. They favored hexagons in their design aesthetic. These were functional and decorative. Their technology was all very environmentally sound. Green tech, for a green planet. They seemed predisposed to communitarian principles, and while highly individualistic, they were also very cooperative in groups when they limited the scope of the group to specific tasks relevant to its constituents’ skills. I would learn, over the next few weeks as I formulated a false identity, obtained work, an apartment, and neighbors to socialize with and observe, this planet did have one unique technology, and it was this technology that made all the difference.

I got lucky. The first job I got was as a medical equipment technician in a birthing hospital. That’s where I saw it, the Ritual. That’s what they call it here, the process of implanting a Synthetic Consciousness inside an organic brain at birth. When the baby is still breathing its first gasps of air, they inject a nanomatrix that reorganizes the body’s “junk carbon” into neural pathways, creating a second layer of consciousness, separate and distinct from the host. The consciousness develops in parallel with the host’s mind into a child-like personality, and eventually, matures with the host into adulthood and old age. And I never would have known if I hadn’t seen them do it to their babies, implant them with the Synthellect- the second soul. I watched a newborn calm as the secondary consciousness coalesced in her young mind. I watched her eyes take on the same knowing contentedness as her elders, as the doctors and nurses, as her rosy-cheeked mother, and her doting father. The newborn gurgled happily when mere moments ago she was crying. The nurse looked up at the doctor from the neural scanner he was holding to the newborn’s head, and he said to her, “Status gold, Doctor. Synthellect presence confirmed. Developmental algorithms engaged.”

The nurse gently helped the newborn’s mother to hold her upright in her arms. The doctor beamed proudly at her work, and the union of mother of child, and said to me, “It never gets old, does it?”

And I said, “No, ma’am.”

 

After that, I started to see life on Elsinor differently.

No one was ever alone, here. Even in their most isolated moments, there was another voice, not their own. Someone they could reach out to and hold onto and trust. The Synthellects were everywhere. They were so ubiquitous they were hardly ever acknowledged, outside the Ritual. But the living reality was, these people didn’t know loneliness. They were always connected with something external to themselves, a voice that could comfort them and affirm and value them. And so, they had no need for conflict, or war. They listened to these inner voices, instead of their fears.

The Second Soul kept the Serpents at bay.

And this planet, Elsinor, this was their Garden.

We had found our true companions.

 

…        …        …        …

 

The Tributes of Garden looked upon my findings with puzzlement. They eyed the syringe, containing the vial of synthellect nanomatrix, suspiciously. A roving eye scanned it and returned to merge again with the iridescent chamber wall that spat it out. I was standing inside the brain that controlled my entire planet, presenting the synthellect as if it were the answer to all our problems. I could not have felt more naked or ignorant. They made me human, in form, and thought process. I had run no tests, gathered no evidence. I merely brought them unknown tech and anecdotes about the idyllic planet it came from. Elsinor. XFP-E1191-J, in our catalog. I missed the place. I wished I was back there. Home wasn’t like I remembered, before I took on this scouting form for my mission. When I was only a primordium node in the collective spirit of Garden, this was a home, but now, I was a being of the universe. I thought, maybe, I’d like to travel again.

“Incompatible,” said the wall, with a consensus of voices.

“We could adapt it…”

“It’s regenerative tech. If we adapted it to run on our platforms, it would become invasive, like a virus. We can’t predict what it would do to us. It could corrupt our matrix. Destroy us.”

“You won’t even try an isolated experiment?” I asked, suddenly referring to that which I had come from as separate from myself.

The wall took notice of the shift. There was a slight ripple across its surface, like a small pebble cast into a pond.

“We,” I corrected myself. “We have to try. There’s too much potential for evolution not to try!”

“It is a reckless notion, from a unit that has served its purpose,” the wall said, of me.

I understood. It would all end, soon. This sense of self, this thing, I, me. It would disappear, now that my mission had concluded, and there was no further use for me. I looked upon the quivering wall and imagined the merging, the melting of parts together into a singular form and mind. That was how we existed, most of the time, on Garden. We only formed self-actualized autonomous units like me for specific purposes. And other than my foreign tech and wild ideas, the offworld scouting missions had brought back nothing we could use to augment ourselves for the better. Unless…

“Maybe it’s not the technology,” I said. “The people. It’s the people. Send a ship. Make official contact. Develop relations with this culture, this planet, Elsinor. It could save us.”

“A more reasonable suggestion,” said the wall. “We will consider it. Prepare to be merged.”

I stood, straight, tall and even a little proud, against the wall, and I let it wrap its molecular sheath around me as it absorbed me back into the gestalt.

 

…        …        …        …

 

On Decuary 32^nd, in the Year of the Pipefish, Eighth Century of the Third Calendar, the first Gardenite Envoy Unit entered orbit of Elsinor to make contact with the people there, and their synthellects. A few weeks later, a group of Elsinite envoys arrived on Garden in one of their diplomatic carriers. The Elsinites, impressed with Garden and its civilization, agreed to a cultural exchange with the Mind of Garden.  More carriers arrived with colonists, and soon, there was a Elsinite community on Garden. The machines called the village “Dialectic.” The human name was unpronounceable. The people of Elsinor didn’t understand entirely why the machines seemed to find their presence so comforting, but they were happy to be needed and admired by such an admirable race of creatures. They came to consider themselves as much a part of the culture of Garden as they were of Elsinor.

Thus, began the Co-Dominionship of Man and Machine. Thus, was balance restored to Garden, in God’s image.

Amen.

 

-          Third Synthesis: Module 1: Subunit 3