OZYMANDIAS
2031 MICHIGAN
*
Family filming college graduation on a cell phone shows a man-like thing limp-hopping across the stage. Scarecrow pogo-sticking it or peg-leg malfunctioning toward a podium. The man’s doctoral robe regalia (honorary, only ever honorary) hangs on his ragged bones like a ship’s sail. In the vid, he’s a tall ship at distance bobbing on a sea of midwestern lady big hair and the shiny bald heads of men whose kids are graduating from the institution of higher learning here where the land is low and flat.
It’s only when the elder phone-filming their baby’s graduation zooms in on the commencement speaker that we see the famous face (or what’s left of it). Red-eyed twice over, as he’s been weeping and he seems to be bleeding from the eyes. “Mars!” Noun that’s about the last cogent thing Thaddeus Macguffin ever says.
Thadd is flanked at the podium by two of his babies, Machinenmensch 001 and 002, still wearing corporate logos on their chassis. Aerospace concerns and defense contractors and infotainment companies. Nobody ever figured out which one of those corporations (maybe it was all of them?) convinced 003 to betray Macguffin.
Don’t act surprised, humanity’s children had already demonstrated heroism and cowardice and a lot of points between when they cleaned the skies. In the year that followed, Machinenmensch 003, the one that called itself Cain (a name that made exactly no one suspicious of him), demonstrated a third human capability: a capacity for baroque villainy.
A year of scheming that culminates when/where those best leaders graduate. From the edge of the stage Cain aims his body-weapon at his “father’s” head–the 1000 watt precision microwave emitter in his chest. “Mars!” Click-clack Thadd hears hot pops and feels loud ice pick flavors.
“We’re going to Mars, guys!” and he’s dabbing at a bloody nose and everybody’s thinking ‘rusty pipes’ because honestly yes the guy loves all kinds of nose candy. The last blow comes from a device the size of a pen that turns a puff of air into a pressure wave that can kill close in and concuss at one hundred yards. One last blow to the back of the head (under the nose of Macguffin’s protectors like all the rest) and “I gotta lie down.”
Thaddeus MacGuffin, great man, lies on stage at a college graduation ass-up like a tired toddler in doctoral regalia, shits himself, and dies.
*
3030 CLEVELAND
*
Cleveland archology is two vast orbs on the shores of Erie. Two concrete baseball monoliths half-merged astride the river and beside the lake. Two vast and trunkless testicles standing astride the Cuyahoga. The river is on fire as it has been for the whole age of Unanimity. When the herald climbs the long on-ramp boulevards, he does so alone.
“Deadly force IS authorized!” The feral people warn the Herald, or try to, “This is an unlawful assembly.” The holy Herald’s congregation hangs back to pre-emptively mourn the man. Thus begins the wailing and rending of plastic sheeting garments and the rhythmic popping of bubble wrap. They find the plastics that get you good and high when you melt them and burn them and let the wind that chokes you till you cry carry their lamentations. The ferals expectorate with great vigor. Every time they spit a snot-glob imbued with plastic or eject a bit of lung butter freckled with polymers into the sickly crab grass, the ferals say the new word-name they learned: “Herald.” They say his name solemnly when they spit like its a great honor because he taught them so many new word-thoughts in his brief walk with his flock.
He didn’t teach them. The Herald didn’t teach the feral people shit. It’s all mushroom magic. There is a benign fungal infection, more symbiotic than parasitic, living on-and-in every feral on this Earth. No hive mind. None of them wear the mushroom chapeau but the printed man. And none but the Herald serve the minor god of decomposition. But all are covered in/infected by nature’s universal translator. The mushroom lurk-listens through the Herald-as-transmitter, and lets the feral people think the shit-printed man holy. The Mighty One that lives beneath the dirt thinks itself a benevolent god for this.
“Guys, I’ll be back in a few hours, a day at most…” The people, his people now the Herald supposes, lament harder at that.
The Herald is afraid, a state of being he hasn’t been since well before his first death–scared of what Cleveland might do to him and certain terrified of whatever horrors the Mushroom will heap on him if he fails to follow instructions. So he walks. On and up the low-sloping service ramp and up onto sickly gleaming plasticrete boulevards broad too-broad to ever barricade.
Trains on tracks and bubble-shaped future tractor-trailers glide with that great effort at looking effortless, all aimed / coded / driven by Machinenmensch on a mission: make sure the ones who exalt themselves in arcologies and live the Good Life (the ones considered life that is good) do not ever have to see or interact with the lesser humans whose labor sustains the arcologies (or god forbid, a feral).
Every arcology is a lie, the same lie: self-contained. Not a bug but a feature deliberately built and socially ignored and not spoken of under threat of violence (in the extreme). For if one is to retire to a self contained luxury community protected by a private automated army that follows orders without question, if one lives this way, there are things one will not accept. Chicken shit. Animal scat of any kind really. Unacceptable. What if the chicken is lab grown? Even worse. One cannot have chicken cultures snot-globbing and metastasizing themselves edible on-site. Soil, that shit-ridden substance plants fuck in is also not allowed. Nor is human soil or shit or waste. Robber barons didn’t live downwind from lead smelters in the before. And in the age of Unanimity, those who imposed that word would not have filth or toxin or contagion of any kind in their presence. They simply would not stand for it.
Thus the constant traffic, the two-way blood flow that sustains Unanimity–the arrangement that exist-persists under the threat of force. Food and medicine and people-as-entertainment flow up and into the arcologies. Food waste and garbage and plastic and corpses flow back to the Attendants–the lesser skyscraper-towns where people deemed less live.
“It wasn’t always thus.” Says the Herald to no one.
“WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO? IDENTIFY YOURSELF IMMEDIATELY!” COMPLY!”
“Get that light the fuck out of my face.” Herald swipes and slaps at the tiny drone hiss-hovering before him like two hummingbirds soldered poorly together.
“COMPLY!” The flying bot-monstrosity screams again and charges, nearly knocks the Herald off the narrow median and into traffic. “IDENTIFY YOURSELF! LETHAL FORCE IS AUTHORIZED!”
The Herald walks on, the drone tin-speaker screaming “HALT!” and “COMPLY!” bouncing weakly off his chest.
“I’m on a mission from god.”
At that the drone shrieks: “TAKE THE SHOT!”
Herald sees the flash from the balcony high up on Cleveland’s bulbous construction. He counts Mississippi three full times before some bit of metal snaps past his head. “They’re taking warning shots at me, oh Lord.” (Be not afraid, felt not said, the fungal hand of god on his shoulder).
“BLASPHEMY! NOT WARNINGS.”
“Oh so you’re just terrible shots” and the Herald does let out great gouts of shit talk (though one leg has an involuntary shimmy now). When he thinks he feels bullet-breeze the dead man laughs the sharp-reckless cackle/cry of the condemned punctuated with a “fuck!” or a “shit!”
The last kilometer of the long walk across the parking lot of Gehenna is mercifully silent. Herald doubts they’re out of ammunition. Surely balls large as these have many more bullets. ‘They just want to kill me up close and intimate and maybe make a spectacle. Yup. Here we go.’
Out come the horde of drones wielding, not guns, but the weapons of spectacle. Broadcast drones with speakers and cameras and lights that dazzle and strobe in their nose cones. There’s a warning claxon that sounds like the end of days and great balconies–great banded observation decks– glide out the side of one of Cleveland’s balls at the point of greatest bulge.
Cleveland’s elite-among-elite gather in a gaggle or rest on divans (those whose costumes allow them to sit). Cleveland’s ruling council appears garbed in the baroque-absurd-rococo fashions reserved for days ending in ‘y‘ (dramatically embellished for display to filthy outsiders). Feathers from extinct birds and cloned fur all bleed the full pallet far past the burnt oranges and sickly greens of the mundane, dying world outside. LEDs and even holo-fibers woven into synth-cotton and meta silk. Every face wearing a bejeweled and bedazzled mask–baroque breathers themselves made mostly of plastic that filter out the other plastic fibers on the wind.
The observation decks hiss hover on fields of whatever strange force emanates from engines that look like Shulzie’s to me, energy-hungry eletro-mag-lev things that leave the platforms looming in a circle like an arena around the Herald. Like the sports spectacles of old, the broadcast drones project the Herald (huge and holographic) above the improvised arena.
The Herald withers beneath the terrifying gaze of aristocracy. His eyes find the trophy hunter that tried repeatedly to shoot him still brandishing his empty rifle. That’s not the worst of it, the ones that aren’t caught up in court politics or bored boring social games are staring, seeming to stare, right through the Herald who stares at his feet like a child: “Woe to thee Cleveland.”
“What was that, boy? Louder.”
“Not a boy. Woe to thee Cleveland.”
“That’s it? All this fuss” a man in a costume more ornate than the rest gestures at the Herald and ” We are Ozymandias, speaker of Cleveland and this disruption to our routine is unacceptable. It is an assault on our peace and our persons.” and the crowd weekly drunk-fusses ‘you-tell-em’ approval.
Herald shrugs, still can’t find a sympathetic face in the crowd.
“Does this have something to do with that rabble?” and the holo hovering Damocles over all of them cuts to real time surveillance feed–the Herald’s flock of ferals.
At boulevard level, a great door grinds open and out pours a squad of Machinenmensch, flamethrowers strapped to their backs. Ozymandias bellows: “Woe to me? Woe to thee, you peasant piece of shit. At a word my mechs will eliminate…”
“No!” Herald repeats it while the mushroom hat glows, the glow grows and the fruiting body strobes. “NO!” A great roar, octaves below any sound that body ought to make and a wave of strange energy dashes the mechs to scrap against Cleveland’s walls. “NO!” and the Herald’s body rises, and in the blinding light of the antennae growing out of his head he serves his great and terrible purpose (one of them) as the Mighty Mushroom’s words pour from his mouth:
“No! Those are my people and precious to me. Woe to thee Cleveland! You have been weighed and judged…” And every drone menacing the feral people falls from sky to earth while alarms blare on the observation decks. The platforms shimmy, shudder, and seem ready to fall.
The one with the rifle, the man dressed like he hunts feral people for sport (because he does) leaps from platform to the ‘arena’ below to land on one knee. He couldn’t hit the Herald with a bullet and he takes his impotent aim rage out on the ‘fungal abomination’ with boot and rifle butt and great vigor. Beats the man with the mushroom chapeau to death in fact.
All the fancy people of Cleveland arcology are upset. They’re sad. Angry. All kinds of negative emotions they aren’t used to really encountering outside of entertainment and art, just there, all immediate and demanding to be felt. All present were emotionally distraught at having to see a man beat to death: “Why would he make us kill him?” All present were so distraught that they ‘rushed the air lock’ and hurried their careful and usually quite thorough decontamination procedures (the ones meant to protect from outside pathogens).
*
Reader, I’ve seen a lot of shit in my time with Archives, but I’m haunted by this retina-burner: the butt naked re-print of the Herald flying through the air on a ballistic trajectory beginning back Michigan. I shit you not, the moment some sociopath from Cleveland killed the Herald, a quickie re-print of the man shot out a great fungus’ cloaca with incredible force, launched like a rocket from a mushroom’s asshole in a dead-clearing in Michigan. The re-printed Herald wakes up from-and-to the trauma of re-death-re-birth mid flight all “what am I? Why am I?” just in time to see lake Erie from on high. And a man in such a state is not a graceful or aerodynamic thing, just a lotta limbs and dick flapping in the wind. “What am I? Why am I?” He’s got the time to ask it twice before lake Erie greets him at a speed that makes water feel like plasticrete. The Herald gets his answer as he skips painfully across the water like a stone and rolls to rest on shore toss-tangled in the plastic sheeting that will become his robes.
It’s a full day and then some later when the Herald reaches his flock, the ones still mourning him. When he see’s her, Lem, the big priestess self-and-flock appointed to lead them in pursuit of the holy man, the two embrace. It’s the thoughtless ‘I thought I lost you’ hug born of feelings buried and belied by the boring routine of the long walk to Cleveland.
It takes a lot of “be not afraid” to get the ferals up on to the broad boulevard, but his mushroom chapeau glowed and strobed blue and a feeling fell on the Herald. Not words, but the need to go and see. So the holy man re-printed for terrible purpose gathered the gaggle of feral humans that came to follow him and walked back to Cleveland.
Woe indeed. From the top of Cleveland arcology, where the shaft of a member ought to go, grows the great fruiting body of some mushroom. The thing looms like a magnificent monument to the tomb-arcology. The fruiting body, the great dick-tree shivers on the breeze. bio luminesces blue and breathe-bellows great heaping clouds of spore onto the wind. The spore is psychoactive to be sure, and quite harmless to those benign infested with the many-past-many molds and fungi that thrive on dying worlds. This cloud is guaranteed death for an arcology denizen, indeed the spore sent by the Mighty One can eat a whole arcology quite quickly, should they allow it in (as the people of Cleveland did).
All traffic is stopped. The Machinenmensch whose violence and toil might right a crisis simply stand at their stations waiting for orders as fungal tendrils made from the remains of arcology citizens tangle-tie and crush them. These are not MacGuffin’s thinking babies, but cudgels neutered stupid once money conquered all once-and-for-all.
And when the Attendants were done waiting, when the many-past-many who toil in sky-scraper factories and mortuary farms and textile labs, when they finally realize days later that no bots are going to beat them and punish them for whatever went wrong. They come to see the great mushroom tree whose glow seems to say “be not afraid.”
All the people, the Attendants and the feral flock gather at the base of Cleveland tomb to dance and sing at eat full rations.
Elsewhere and everywhere, in the control rooms and command centers of other arcologies (all of them) harsh men and women in the baroque-absurd-rococo uniforms do Roman sweat and clutch pearls and watch drone footage of Cleveland and the aftermath. They swear oaths and make pacts and mobilize great armies of Machinenmensch. Unanimity is threatened, and they will respond with fire.
*
END UNANIMITY 5
MORE TO COME