Shayna Rande tears were every bit as salty as the ones that she shed when her womb mother had died, some ten years before.
The rain was falling lightly, but there was nothing light in her and her family situation.
Their first daughter, Pam, had been a regular affair.
Shayna's wifesband, Rita, had been the womb-mother, and there had been no complications. Rita had brought Pam to the end, and just six months after her birth, she was back at work.
Shayna and her wifesband had no problems, sharing the care of the little redhead like all good married couples do.
When it had been time for Shayna to carry the couple's second daughter, they hitched a snafu - or, rather, three of them.
Louise, Dominique and Sally, the triplets had been a much unexpected turn of events for the family, a great source of joy - and problems.
Three as they were, they meant that Rita and Shayna had to decide, and one of them had to act as a stay-at-home mom.
Rita was the better paid of the two and, also, the one that enjoyed her work more.
Shayna took the mantle of the housebound, though she had always thought that - some day - she would have dusted her skills, get an update and gone back on the job market.
In the end, favourable conditions never came around.
The very technological branch she was trained for, analogic signal processing, had virtually disappeared in the fourteen years after the birth of the kids.
They had grown up enough that they did not need 24/7 care, now, and Shayna had just begun a re-training program, on the installation of industrial implants electric systems.
Another year or so, and she would have been gone back to work, and aided Rita paying the bills - what was the saying, "tell Gods your plans"? Shayna was a devout Xhristian but, at times, she thought that the Noxonians had it right. They didn't call their God with any capital letter. "Advanced Alien" that it was, though, it was honest... it only kept the world from stop spinning on itself, and some other obscure activities.
The kids were all crying, at her left, watching the coffin of their first mother being lowered into the ground.
Amidst the pain of the loss of her life companion, Shayna felt the sting of impending financial catastrophe.
There was no way that she could manage to complete her re-training course and secure a new job - not before their landlady could throw them in the street. Her lover was dead, her life felt like it was nearly over, and her four daughters were going to be separated by the social services.
That night, she watched herself in the mirror.
Shayna wasn't a great beauty, just an average woman, one like there were thousands. At 44 it was absolutely unlikely that she could snatch some sugar mama - she couldn't have managed it even when she was 22, and her tits had the freshness of just bloomed adultness. She simply was not al that gorgeous.
Before going to sleep, she prayed her God - whichever god that was out there, really - to show her a way, any way out of her situation.
She indeed received a divine answer, but not the one that she expected, and not from any god that she cared to contact.
The dream was calm and cosy - it took a while, before she even realized that it was a dream... she felt no anxiety, and this was not normal for her.
Her dreams were filled of that sentiment, ever since she finished high-school, being usually horror loops of her trying to find an exit from the place, doors shut and rocket boots that couldn't fly her above the damn stupid building.
This place was not the abominating vocational high where her hard-mom - the late Louise the elder - had forced her to go.
It looked like a leisure hotel on some tropical island, almost exactly like the one Shayna and Rita went for their honeymoon. The thought flashed her mind, and filled her with a bout of pain at remembrance of the smile of Rita.
"What's up your mind, Tiger Lily?" - the voice gave her shivers, crawling up her back.
It was human, but so grave - graver than even men's voices, in "Modern Geographic's" documentaries on the Manserrails.
The monster - she could not call it any other way - looked like a man, a seven feet tall black man, and one that seemed mentally capable.
The men in the menserrails didn't look much human, given that their brains were systematically addled in their intrauterine environments - males were kept as a failsafe, in case the sophisticated technology used to create para-sperm was lost or became unsustainable, but no woman on the planet was any eager to see their gender resurrect and overpower them, as it used to do on Earth Prime (or whatever the rest of the galaxy calls that shitty planet now).
This "Man" seemed a person, a functional human male - something no woman on the planet had ever witnessed.
It was very strange, with that thing on the front - something called, if Shayna remembered well, penis - and those very excessive muscular fascias all over the body.
- "So, tell me, what are you looking for, woman?"
- "Are you... God?"
- "Kind of" - Shayna had never considered the Noxonian mythology with anything less than contempt, or she'd already recognized the cocky black bastard as one of the most infamous avatars of their 'god' (small caps and apostrophes strictly required by just mentioned mythos).
Given her strict Xhristian observance - "thou shall not have other other God but the one true God, and that's me, or else..." - this was to be expected.
Other religions were much more open to syncretism - the Noxonians being a most egregious case, its credo being a maddening "worship who do you want, I do not care; I am going to be necessary anyway, so one way or the other I will have my stream of fresh flesh", and the Shinto were very hot on their trail with their audacious "any God you may worship has a spot in our pantheon" concept - and tolerated that their believers got contacts with other credos, but that was not the case for Shayna's.
Xhristianity was a relatively new variant of an old religion from the original planet, that the Prophet Stian had discovered, hidden in the colony database. and that she liberated with the help of Xri, the martyr.
- "Are you the devil?"
- "Shaitan, the adversary? No... but, in a way, I am in the market of souls - indirectly, that is."
- "So, do you want my soul?"
- "Indirectly. So, why are you so desperate that my world-wide mind filters can pick your screams, in the middle of all the clutter?"
- "I am not desperate - we are just having some small issues."
- "Ending in the street, destitute, you and your family? Social services splitting up the five of you? No reason to be desperate, no."
- "The church will help me."
- "Indeed, they will, but you know the local government, how it works - first they will split the girls, distributing them among wealthy, childless couples, then you can get back on your feet, and try to appeal to their decisions for the rest of your life... or till the kids grown to legal age. I have a more immediate proposal."
- "Riches and safe haven for my family, in exchange for my soul?"
- "Eh, almost" - the man oscillated his big hand in front of her, in a gesture that she did not really recognize as it used to mean "more or less", way before the FTL probe that colonized the planet departed from their original civilization.
A gesture that had not been included in the programming of the robot-nurses that raised the first generation of kids spawned by the probe, and had -thus - independently resurfaced in only about a third of the world's cultures.
- "Not much riches, but plenty of haven."
- "For my soul?"
- "For your bodacious dedication, your family will have three meals a day, an adequate shelter and complete non-interference from the local agency of children disservices."
- "Is this a dream?"
- "Are your dreams always so business-like?" - The black 'god' grinned, very much un-business-like.
- "So, what should I do?" - Shayna was more playing along than anything else.
- "Go at this address,..." - the huge black handed her a piece of paper, with something scribbled on - "..., describe them this dream, listen to what they have to say, and decide. But I am confident that you will choose for the best of everybody."
Shayna looked at the address on the paper, and recognized that it was somewhat familiar, though she couldn't really focus on it - "Offers Garden Plaza, number 12".
She immediately awoke, and reached to squeeze her eyes, as often when she woke up, and almost stabbed her right eye with the piece of paper squeezed in her hand. She threw it away, as if it was a snake.
The huge wall went on for almost a hundred meters, in both directions. Shayna understood why the address was familiar - this was the enclosed botanic garden that the Church of Noxon used to have in the outskirts of the city.
When the city expanded, it ended becoming a near-centre town feature, and taxes on it skyrocketed during the Atheists reign, so the Noxonians hadbto sell it and build a new one in Akeron (creating the neo-town, really).
Of the vast complex of condos, facing inward to the garden, only a small section was now property of the church, and likely not for more.
However, the Bursar office for the local Noxon Chapter was still in the last building owned by the church, which was really no surprise, as most of the economics of the church revolved around cable television rights nowadays, being the Noxon ceremonies still the pinnacle of televised S&M for the Great Frakka land. Having the office where all producer companies also had theirs made quite a bit of sense.
Shayna trembled, when she pushed the button - a life of facing the stern mugs of Xhristian nuns, from kindergarten to the end of middle school, had left her vulnerable to those scary old women, and any other kind of monastic woman.
She took her courage with both hands, tossed her heart above the fence, and rung the old buzzer.
- "Hi, who are you?"
The "Nun" - Shayna had problems remembering that this was not a nun but, rather, a Noxon priestess... colour and simplified cut of the robe apart, the pudgy, short woman looked every bit a nun as any of those that she ever met at her Xhrystian schools - looked at her through a couple of glasses.
The clergywoman was clearly way younger than her, something quite unexpected, as Noxonian clergy was composed almost entirely by retired "Officiants" - all women forty and beyond, usually quite bit beyond.
- "I... I had a dream" - Shayna felt stupid, saying it, but the - uh, non-nun - simply opened her eyes a slight more, to pose more attention.
- "Yes. What Kind of dream?"
In a bungle of nervousness, Shayna started answering, while looking in her purse for the scrap of paper.
- "There was this huge, black man, that gave me this address"
- "A man? Those Modern Geographic Society documentaries are an hassle. A black man that gave you this address?" - The priestess sound a bit sarcastic, but not nearly as much as Shayna expected. Then, the middle aged mom finally found the piece of paper, and offered it to the priestess, adding "In the dream, he gave me this".
- "Did he? Let's see." - the younger woman took the message in hand, and started reading the unintelligible scribbles below the address, one of her eyebrows raising up irresistibly.
Whatever was written on the scrap, she could read it - then, with sudden urgency, she invited Shayna in, and started walking through the corridors of the building, driving the flabbergasted blonde through a few offices occupied by older, more stereotypical Noxon priestesses.
Then they went up a stair, till they reached an ample office, with a big, bright, arched window.
- "Wait, while I fetch my superior"
Rayna sat on the old, comfortably born guest chair. She waited for some minutes, before feeling
he bite of curiosity, and she took in hand one of the photographic books that were on the shelf, on the visitor's side of the office.
She started flipping its pages, then she hastily laid it back on the shelf.
It was an yearbook of Noxon Officiants, names, ages, their photos in the white, flowing vest that they dress on the route to the ziggurats, and then photos from the services, naked, battered, trembling, and smiling.
She dared not to look at more than those few, initial pages... she went on sitting, thinking about what the hell was she doing in that heathen place. It had been, she was more and more sure, a pretty stupid mistake.
Whatever solution her situation may have, it was out there, surely not here.
Yet, running away, seemed rude...
- "Hi. How do you do?" - this woman looked every bit as old as everybody would expect a senior Noxonian priestess to be. Late seventies or early eighties, every bit as dignified as a Xhrystian abbess.
In many ways, their jobs were very similar.
- "It was such a long time since I saw the last dream-sheet."
Shayna inferred that the wrinkled old lady was talking about the mysterious piece of paper, that had apparently crossed the divide between dreams and reality -. or had been composed by one Mrs. Rande, while asleep..
- "Ah, yes - I recognise the alphabet." - the priest's smile grew wider again - "it is a fun trick, really."
- "Trick?"
- "Yes - the alphabet is pre-colonization hiragana, but the words are not Japanese, and there are spaces - the language is Common Elish."
- "And what was written?"
- "A most Noxonian message" - the old woman giggled uncontrollably - "Am I right, thinking that you are in some existential pinch?"
-"I, ehm... my wifesband, Rita, has died and left me with four daughters, no job, an open debt with our landlady and a bank account in deep red."
- "Oh... four girls. Age?"
- "Sixteen, the older, 14 the triplets".
- "I see... our God, Noxon, has gently decided to offer you asylum."
- "Really?"
- "Of course, our Church is not as rich as most people believes, so what we can really offer, to you and your children, is a flat inside the officiant's complex in Akeron."
- "A flat inside?... do you want me to become one of your 'officiants'?"
- "Do you want to become one of them?"
- "No, I am a Xhrystian!"
- "That would not be an issue - Noxon does not care whether the officiants believe or not in its divine nature, or do participate to our church activities for any mystic reason."
- "I beg your pardon?"
- "If you believe that Noxon is just some kind of sufficiently advanced alien that faps over images of beautiful women undergoing" - the old woman waved her hand, to signify t
hat she was not going to specify what both knew happened in the Noxon rites - "and, in exchange, stabilize the rotations of our planet, then participate does not represente worshipping a god different from your own."
- "What are you saying?"
- "If you do not want to become an officiant, there are plenty of organizational jobs that must be covered, and that you can take to contribute to our organization survival. If perchance you fancy become an officiant, there is no reason why you could not, simply accepting its basic nature as a toil that someone must do to keep our world alive."
- "No worship required?"
- "None whatsoever - Noxon does not care, whichever god the women sacrificed to its pleasure may really worship."
- "So, we can have a flat? Gratis?"
- "Great is its clemency, and such is its offer. Unfortunately, you must realize that the Akeron Officiant House is, literally, a closed community. You daughters will probably find it an excessively sanitized environment, as no alcohol nor drugs are allowed in."
- "And I do not have to worship your god, in any way?"
- "No reason to - after all, it is not a God. At most, it is some god-like entity that has accompanied the very colonization of our world in the last five thousand years."
- "I will think about it"
- "The offer is open-ended, but I think that it would be better if your belongings were out of your landlady's reach as soon as possible. Here, this is my visit card - if you decide to accept our lord's hospitality, call me, and I will arrange everything."
By the end of the week, a the last job hope that Shayna had had disappeared, and she found herself composing the number of the bursar.
By the end of the month, her and the kids were living inside the Officiant's house, where she soon found herself employed as a cook assistant, with an initially meagre pay that allowed her to continue pursuing her re-training courses.
Noxon had been vewry generous, indeed.
Of course, it would have taken a while, for Shayna to realize that she had never been the true target behind its offer.
Friday, 30 December 2016
Thursday, 22 December 2016
Sins of the past
[Note: this is not a piece of fiction]
One of the ugliest characteristics of past sins is that they often come back, to bite one's ass.
Of course, "come back" may already be a question of luck: some of us can hardly leave the bastards alone, and spend far too many idly moments revisiting past mistakes, with the depressing belief that even if we manage to learn a lesson from any of them, we will just make new, worse errors going forward.
They do not always come back directly, sometimes they arrive in a very tangential way.
The last "sin" to bite my ass is my tendency to consider that, in a BDSM interaction, all the responsibility for preventable mishaps that still happen goes to the top/dom/master.
Due to an unfortunate choice of examples in a munch, the question poisoned the last peer rope I was in and, because of said sin of mines, I did not contribute much - at all, really - in quashing the turmoil.
I didn't add gasoline to the fire either, but that is not much of a consolation.
I had a couple of days to sleep on the issue, and came to the conclusion that that day's reunion organizer - a woman with a metric ton of character, that also happen to be a rope model - opinion, on it, was ultimately correct.
And her opinion was, in one word: "Poppycock".
The bottom/sub/masochists share some responsibilities with their partners (and vice-versa), though the law of the land may differ quite vigorously on it (but after all, laws, justice and ethics are often only vaguely related to each other).
Even in a Total Power Exchange play, not only the limits of the game must be agreed before, but the play will always relay on an honest communication between the players.
This can break down either because the "top" fails to care for the clues given by the "bottom", either because this latter is so engulfed in the sub-space that it can hardly report what is happening to its body.
When this happen, though, I think that it is only natural for the "dom" to feel completely responsible of the shit that happens, because when the "bottom" flies away, it should be brought back to Earth, if there is any possible danger.
On the other hand, if the millisecond the "dom" distracts to get the next strand of rope, the "hogtied" model unexpectedly - they had never discussed the possibility - starts jumping around because it likes to play the escapist... it is a bit hard to assign to the top more than a token of responsibility.
The turmoil in my much beloved backyard started after a guy used the "If you go dressed as a whore in the Bronx, you may well expect that they rape you", used as a set-up to justify for an equally maddening "If a slave choose an inexpert master, it is also hir fault when shit happens".
Both assertions manages to irritate me on a strictly utilitarian level (no need to invoke my progressive, libertarian nature, here - if women won't feel safe going around scantily dressed, they won't do it - clue a certain frustration on my part; similarly, if submissive women feel that scarcely experienced doms cannot be trusted, they won't give them any chance, and I happen to be one of them).
Personally, I'd like to live in a world where a woman could fell asleep in a subway station, dressed only with leather collar and cuffs, and the only thing that could happen would be her catching a bit of a cold.
In fact , I like to think that I try to bring on such a world with my art... even though, I fear, no amount of my art will ever be enough to change the idiotic mores of our societies.
So, yes, sub/bottom/slaves may be responsible of mishaps - when they do violate the"contract" at the base of the session.
But, no, they are not responsible just for choosing an inexperienced companion, that tries too fancy a move and fucks-up (among the other things, because there are very few top
In the end, it is like for everything else - there is no such things as fixed or reliable rule, not even a rule-of-thumb, and the devil (or god) is in the details.
One of the ugliest characteristics of past sins is that they often come back, to bite one's ass.
Of course, "come back" may already be a question of luck: some of us can hardly leave the bastards alone, and spend far too many idly moments revisiting past mistakes, with the depressing belief that even if we manage to learn a lesson from any of them, we will just make new, worse errors going forward.
They do not always come back directly, sometimes they arrive in a very tangential way.
The last "sin" to bite my ass is my tendency to consider that, in a BDSM interaction, all the responsibility for preventable mishaps that still happen goes to the top/dom/master.
Due to an unfortunate choice of examples in a munch, the question poisoned the last peer rope I was in and, because of said sin of mines, I did not contribute much - at all, really - in quashing the turmoil.
I didn't add gasoline to the fire either, but that is not much of a consolation.
I had a couple of days to sleep on the issue, and came to the conclusion that that day's reunion organizer - a woman with a metric ton of character, that also happen to be a rope model - opinion, on it, was ultimately correct.
And her opinion was, in one word: "Poppycock".
The bottom/sub/masochists share some responsibilities with their partners (and vice-versa), though the law of the land may differ quite vigorously on it (but after all, laws, justice and ethics are often only vaguely related to each other).
Even in a Total Power Exchange play, not only the limits of the game must be agreed before, but the play will always relay on an honest communication between the players.
This can break down either because the "top" fails to care for the clues given by the "bottom", either because this latter is so engulfed in the sub-space that it can hardly report what is happening to its body.
When this happen, though, I think that it is only natural for the "dom" to feel completely responsible of the shit that happens, because when the "bottom" flies away, it should be brought back to Earth, if there is any possible danger.
On the other hand, if the millisecond the "dom" distracts to get the next strand of rope, the "hogtied" model unexpectedly - they had never discussed the possibility - starts jumping around because it likes to play the escapist... it is a bit hard to assign to the top more than a token of responsibility.
The turmoil in my much beloved backyard started after a guy used the "If you go dressed as a whore in the Bronx, you may well expect that they rape you", used as a set-up to justify for an equally maddening "If a slave choose an inexpert master, it is also hir fault when shit happens".
Both assertions manages to irritate me on a strictly utilitarian level (no need to invoke my progressive, libertarian nature, here - if women won't feel safe going around scantily dressed, they won't do it - clue a certain frustration on my part; similarly, if submissive women feel that scarcely experienced doms cannot be trusted, they won't give them any chance, and I happen to be one of them).
Personally, I'd like to live in a world where a woman could fell asleep in a subway station, dressed only with leather collar and cuffs, and the only thing that could happen would be her catching a bit of a cold.
In fact , I like to think that I try to bring on such a world with my art... even though, I fear, no amount of my art will ever be enough to change the idiotic mores of our societies.
So, yes, sub/bottom/slaves may be responsible of mishaps - when they do violate the"contract" at the base of the session.
But, no, they are not responsible just for choosing an inexperienced companion, that tries too fancy a move and fucks-up (among the other things, because there are very few top
In the end, it is like for everything else - there is no such things as fixed or reliable rule, not even a rule-of-thumb, and the devil (or god) is in the details.
Monday, 12 December 2016
Trump
The disenfranchised white lower middle class of the USA had found its champion, Donald J.Trump.
The media may have been dumbfounded, and I admit it, I was too.
Because, the last time I saw it happens, when my fellow Italian countrymen chose Silvio Berlusconi as their rescuing hero, that man virtually complete control of media was an essential part of his ascension.
(Berlusconi has always denied having such control... but, how many time the owner of an American private broadcasting corporation has ever called the chief of PBS to get a job to a starlette, that was in turn shagging a supporter of the then-current government, so that said supporter withdraw and let said government topple? S.B. was accidentally taped doing such a call, some years ago...)
Donald Trump is not Silvio Berlusconi. By his own preferred metrics for success in life, he is just a bit more than half a Berlusconi.
The Italian, son of a mid-level bank manager, went from playing pianos on cruising ships to 6.9 billion $ of personal wealth.
The Donald went from being the son of Trump senior to... 3.7 billion $.
It's a lot... still, merely a 1/7th of what Bill Gates donated ever since he was fed of being singled out as the incarnation of new tech corporations greed.
So, if someone voted for the guy because they bought in Trump's mythology as a successful entrepreneur... I can concede that he does not suck, but some players in his league could argue differently.
As for, fixing things in the economy so that his voters may have it better?
They may as well forget it.
These Americans are in for a discovery... they just elected as their President a member of that very same 1/1000th that, in the last 30 years, has scooped up that 8% of the national income that went out of the pockets of the lower half of the middle class.
He is also someone that whole-heartedly believes that giving his fellow 1/1000thers more opportunities to do business on their own terms - community needs be damned - will result in improvements.
Is it going to work, this time?
No - if it did, the Bush era would not have ended with the great recession.
In this four years, we will likely see to a lot of stuff that appeals to the guts of Trump voters - the disbandment of Planned Parenthood, more systematic obstacles on the access to abortion, the repeal of affirmative action initiatives, maybe a push to renew a ban on gay marriage (I don't think it will pass... after all, LGBT are born with the same incidence everywhere and from everybody and, to be honest, given that they seem not better not worse than anybody else at the parenting game, society has little real reasons to renege that right... if the economical purpose of families is to create the next generation of citizens, gay couples function just about the same).
Mind you, it is all stuff that does not cost a dime.
Probably, we'll see Obamacare dismantled, so that insurance companies will be allowed top ditch someone's ass again, whence (s)he became too costly a client to maintain (it was among the reasons why cancer statistics in US were so appalling) and the cost/benefits ratio of the U.S. health system will keep being abysmal.
We'll see it, because many people who contributed to his campaign will gain from it.
It would give healthy dividends to some of the worse rent-seekers on the planet.
We'll see maybe more spending on weapons - which is, really, more a way to subsidize uncompetitive local industries, for the sake of political gains, than an actual improvement of national security - and less on anything that DJT does not care about.
Maybe it will finally be the end for NEA - mixed feeling on that, on my part. I was never going to get a grant from that anyway.
But, serious policies to try to improve the lot of that white, low middle class America that voted for him?
That costs money and political capital that DJT does not really have.
I expect four years of complaining about the resistance put up by democrats on his proposals- truth is, many of the Republicans in both houses will have their reasons to stop the guy, on this or that issue - and not much more.
But by the end of the term, nothing will have changed in his voters plights, which is understandable.
It is just about what a bunch of economical has-been should expect from the rule of a social Darwinist.
Or, if you prefer, what the same kind of Italians got from 17 tears of Berlusconi.
The media may have been dumbfounded, and I admit it, I was too.
Because, the last time I saw it happens, when my fellow Italian countrymen chose Silvio Berlusconi as their rescuing hero, that man virtually complete control of media was an essential part of his ascension.
(Berlusconi has always denied having such control... but, how many time the owner of an American private broadcasting corporation has ever called the chief of PBS to get a job to a starlette, that was in turn shagging a supporter of the then-current government, so that said supporter withdraw and let said government topple? S.B. was accidentally taped doing such a call, some years ago...)
Donald Trump is not Silvio Berlusconi. By his own preferred metrics for success in life, he is just a bit more than half a Berlusconi.
The Italian, son of a mid-level bank manager, went from playing pianos on cruising ships to 6.9 billion $ of personal wealth.
The Donald went from being the son of Trump senior to... 3.7 billion $.
It's a lot... still, merely a 1/7th of what Bill Gates donated ever since he was fed of being singled out as the incarnation of new tech corporations greed.
So, if someone voted for the guy because they bought in Trump's mythology as a successful entrepreneur... I can concede that he does not suck, but some players in his league could argue differently.
As for, fixing things in the economy so that his voters may have it better?
They may as well forget it.
These Americans are in for a discovery... they just elected as their President a member of that very same 1/1000th that, in the last 30 years, has scooped up that 8% of the national income that went out of the pockets of the lower half of the middle class.
He is also someone that whole-heartedly believes that giving his fellow 1/1000thers more opportunities to do business on their own terms - community needs be damned - will result in improvements.
Is it going to work, this time?
No - if it did, the Bush era would not have ended with the great recession.
In this four years, we will likely see to a lot of stuff that appeals to the guts of Trump voters - the disbandment of Planned Parenthood, more systematic obstacles on the access to abortion, the repeal of affirmative action initiatives, maybe a push to renew a ban on gay marriage (I don't think it will pass... after all, LGBT are born with the same incidence everywhere and from everybody and, to be honest, given that they seem not better not worse than anybody else at the parenting game, society has little real reasons to renege that right... if the economical purpose of families is to create the next generation of citizens, gay couples function just about the same).
Mind you, it is all stuff that does not cost a dime.
Probably, we'll see Obamacare dismantled, so that insurance companies will be allowed top ditch someone's ass again, whence (s)he became too costly a client to maintain (it was among the reasons why cancer statistics in US were so appalling) and the cost/benefits ratio of the U.S. health system will keep being abysmal.
We'll see it, because many people who contributed to his campaign will gain from it.
It would give healthy dividends to some of the worse rent-seekers on the planet.
We'll see maybe more spending on weapons - which is, really, more a way to subsidize uncompetitive local industries, for the sake of political gains, than an actual improvement of national security - and less on anything that DJT does not care about.
Maybe it will finally be the end for NEA - mixed feeling on that, on my part. I was never going to get a grant from that anyway.
But, serious policies to try to improve the lot of that white, low middle class America that voted for him?
That costs money and political capital that DJT does not really have.
I expect four years of complaining about the resistance put up by democrats on his proposals- truth is, many of the Republicans in both houses will have their reasons to stop the guy, on this or that issue - and not much more.
But by the end of the term, nothing will have changed in his voters plights, which is understandable.
It is just about what a bunch of economical has-been should expect from the rule of a social Darwinist.
Or, if you prefer, what the same kind of Italians got from 17 tears of Berlusconi.
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
Nine is a famiy.
Xanthippe Xeyos arrived in her office the usual way - she flew in from the west window.
As always when it was raining along her flightpath, she was wearing her hood with rotor-glasses. No normal human would ever use something like those, but the Woman of Titanium was not really normal, wasn't she?
She had felt the presence of the intruder from half a km away - however, the building security system was also aware of this visitor, too, which meant that this girl was likely not moved by bad intentions, or completely ineffectual.
The girl - now looking at a glass close full of starships models - was a Molly, one of an unknown number of clone-sisters among whom was Xanthippe's lover, The First Molly.
- "I hope that you have no problem, finding my office, Molly."
The short woman turned around, her face flushed bright red.
Xanthippe's mind registered the dance of the muscles below the brownish skin - this was Molly, all right, as she would be if her favoured past-time was running under the Sun with weights on wrists and ankles and not lying on a sofa, reading some old book. Xanthippe felt a wave of attraction for this "improved" lookalike of her lover - whatever this girl was, she didn't let out the same subliminal, homicidal tension of some of her brethren.
- "Uh, yes. When I entered the building, some nice woman asked me if I was here to see you, and guided me to this place"
- "I suppose you only heard the voice of this woman." - on friday afternoon, Xanthippe was usually the only one to be in the office, as local Earthlings had problems getting the 25 hours a week Anipos' Legation working schedule, and many so-called entrepreneurs kept getting angry when they couldn't reach the Legation secretary/liaison officer for Earthbound affairs in old plain office hours.
Xanthippe had tried to explain - plenty of times - that Anipos Prime functioned under a strict 16 hours/week maximum allowed workload law - working more than that was considered "job hoarding", an offense punished with three months of jail for every supernumerary hour/week worked, and with the requisition of all "ill-gotten" wealth.
Of course, 16 hours/week was already more than the planet ecosystem could safely support, and should have already been reduced to 12, if not for the fear that people would turn to hobbies even more resources-wasting than work, out of sheer boredom.
That being the case, Anipos workers were encouraged to slack off as much as possible... with scarce results. "Giving you best at work" was widely considered the best remedy to depression and existential ennuis, so the Anipos tended to assault their sixteen hours jobs like they were in a marathon.
In a galaxy full of long established civilizations that had to learn that there was no practical way to relieve ecological pressures through other-worlds expansion, the Anipos' choice wasn't even the worst scenario.
They still managed to keep their 600 millions inhabitants reasonably happy and busy.
Other worlds had simply written off whole underclasses and social strata - often, several billions citizens of them - through the institution of severely demanding policies for the release of reproduction permits.
Not as much "kill the poor" as "let them die off, childless".
- "It was the building's automation control, Molly." - Xanthippe managed to keep any sarcasm out of her voice... the other Molly may be sophisticated players in "the Game", but this one was possibly made of a different material. Xanthippe shared her bed with another "different Molly", so she knew that it was entirely possible.
- "My name is Dana."
- "I thought that it was Molly, like your sisters."
- "Dana, call me Dana."
The young woman seemed distressed, in a very human way - nothing tingled on Xanthippe super-human senses.
- "So, who are you? A spy? An enforcer? An assassin? Don't tell me, an existentialist poet?"
The banterous question irritated the girl, which was fine - Xanthippe and the building still didn't perceive the host of odd forces and sensor probes that surrounded all of Molly's sisters. This one was either human, or had better self-control than any of her sisters.
- "I... this was a mistake." - And like this, she ran away - at less than 30 km/h. A speed that wasn't even worth the "paltry" adjective, for Xanthippe standards.
The Betan woman considered it for a couple of seconds, then stepped out from the window.
The black haired kid took some seconds more to come out of the Legation office building - she was fast, for a normal human, and continued half-walking, half-running, till the Legation building was well out of sight.
At which point, she bent against a wall and started crying.
- "So, you are not a poet, What do you do?"
Dana, startled, looked up, tears running her mascara and a question written in her stare - how the hell Xanthippe was there? Xanthi found her almost irresistible - a Molly with some deeper feelings? Oh, my.
- "I am much slower than your sisters, but so are you. So, who are you, and what do you do?"
- "I am an acrobat with the "Cirque Orferes""
- "Can you fly?" - the little woman shook her head - "No", while cleaning her tears with a hand, making even more of a mess of her face
- "OK, I can walk, and I'd like to walk you to The Bretwitch Canteen, two blocks from here. Would you accept to dine with me?"
The Molly looked at her, incredulous, then nodded
- "Good - and we will discuss what disturbs you so much."
The Bretwitch was a much younger institution than it stated in the logo - it started as a Kosher Deli takeaway right before the middle of 21st century, and it wasn't the best place to dine in town.
However it was affordable, the cuisine was decent and it also had a great anti-paparazzi policy.
Most of the clients were mobsters, not above disappearing the photographer that took the wrong photo. Other clients were way worse, and didn't leave corpses for the families to mourn. Arguably, Xanthippe was among said others, profile-wise, even if she did not kill people directly.
As in a badly written book, Dana's acrobat lover, a certain Simon, had fallen ill.
The illness was genetic, incurable and fatal - one of those 6000 or so ailments that were so rare that hardly anybody studied them, and virtually no money was invested in a cure. Unfortunately, a great number of these illnesses resulted from genetic mutations intervened after the lost of hyper-travel had fragmented the human Galaxy in its current form, some 50000 years before - no cures could be found on other worlds, as the rest of humanities didn't share the relevant mutations. .
Simon was the guy for whom Dana had bailed out of "The Other" organization.
- "Really? You simply took, said 'To hell with this', and walked out?" - Xanthippe was amazed - "No repercussions?".
- "I couldn't fly any more, or remember half of the days from before I left the group." - Dana looked out of the window, probably to hide the pain in her own eyes from the inquisitive alien - "It took me months, to learn how to move with only my muscles. 'It' had no reasons to kill me - I was a good example of what happened when one left its service."
So, "it" didn't broke her knees... simply because it would have been redundant.
She fixed her glare on Xanthippe, suddenly - "I think that I would have killed me, if not for Simon."
Her eyes took on a liquid light, as if she was just one step from openly crying - which she probably was.
- "And he took you as a partner in the acrobatic act, too?"
- "Turns out, the `pale shadow of what I was is still good enough to learn to walk on a rope. I am small, but strong, and my reflexes are still good."
Xanthippe didn't vouch his ideas on this last detail - the tune-ups that made Dana's brain able to perform at "hyper-high speed" were the kind of biological machinery that couldn't really be removed, at least not without converting someone into a vegetal.
As such, while her body could have been downgraded to be only human (maybe), her reflexes were still - probably - very fast, bordering on absurdly rapid.
- "Why were you in my office?"
- "I have seen a gossip article in a magazine, you with your... last lover. The first of us" - the "real" Molly... Xanthippe had realized, at the very beginning , that none of the clones realized that "her" Molly, too, was a clone - possibly, one from a `previous batch.
An unmodified one, with no cybernetic black-boxes stuffed inside, who had been allowed to grow on her own terms in an adoptive family... but the methylation markers, the telomeres shortening and other indices were there.
She was not the original Molly, either.
Most likely, the last one in a "control group" of "naturals" that had been dispersed and used - as base reference - to steer the development of the "souped-up" versions.
All of them, clones of the same girl, that likely was 11 when her material was sampled, some moment half the first quarter of the previous century.
It was, possibly, also the reason why they all had roughly the same age - the bio-techs had found no indices that they were rapid-grown in a vat.
That was a trick nobody, in the whole galaxy, had ever managed to pull satisfactorily - at least, not without extensive genetic modifications, liable to wreak systemic havocs down the poor kid.
The "Mollys" really were, all, sisters - twins.
But the "supers", for some reason, had convinced themselves that their "known" normal sister was, really, the source.
Xanthippe suspected that this shaped a lot of their existential narrative - in fact, "the Assassin" had hinted, in one of her late night incursions, about what could happen if ever Xanthippe made Molly cry.
To be honest, the Woman of Titanium slept badly for a week or so, after that... her relationship with the unsuspecting girl was a trilling, double edged challenge.
- "Do you want to meet her?"
- "No, I want to let my... former employer know that I am available to come back, if he can cure Simon."
- "Why coming to me? Just send a phone call to " - Xanthippe paused, while she reflected on it - "my office. I am pretty sure that 'it' wiretapped any cable in and out of it, the very moment that they were laid down".
- "So did the US Government, and the NSSSR, the United Nations Intelligence Directorate, the three Republics of China, Japan, South Korea, the EU Global Intelligence Agency, the..."
Dana may have lost half of what made her whatever she was, before her escape to freedom, but apparently she still understood enough of "the game" to avoid the most obvious blunders.
- "Stop, I get it. Publicizing your former nature as an affiliate of the 'Greatest World Terroristic Network', among the fine listeners of my channel, would not improve your friend's health. Whereas, human intelligence around the legation is virtually nil, given the building's AI bad habits."
- "Nowadays, Intelligence agencies seldom invest more than a tiny percentage of their budget in 'foot soldiers'. So, entering the building was safer than calling on the phone, no?"
Not exact, but almost.
Xanthippe couldn't help but think that this was because most "global threats" surrounding the Legation, as perceived by the various nation-states, were not humans in nature.
Yet, it was a mistake... the 'bots in the space kept almost all their point-to-point links well away from the Earth space, but those of them that had longer maintained an android avatar on Earth did met through them, at a couple of bars, and chatted about work.
It costed her a lot to discover this, and the old Russian operatives that stalked the two bars since she had pinned down their locations were her most conspicuous infraction to the Legation budget integrity, but it was also the way she got most of her useful information on the "hidden alien threats operating on the planet".
What her chief then really did with her reports, Xanthippe had some clue, and she gladly ignored it.
If the boss preferred printed reports as toilet paper, it was not her fault.
A sudden, low buzz caught her attention. She recognized the ultrasound feed, from quite a few of her most worrying recent moments. "Razor", the most murderous of the "sisters", was near.
- "So, you hope that I pass the message to one of them? That you are ready to come back to the fold, in exchange for saving Simon?"
-·"Yes."
- "It is not going to work."
- "Why? ... I am sure that they already know that I contacted you."
- "I am sure that they already knew everything about Simon. I do not think that your 'Boss' can do anything for him."
- "What? No. It can do everything it want! It does everything it wants!"
- "Reprogramming a broken genetic code in an adult body is much more difficult than assembling a cyborg on a developing foetus, or embryonic genetic engineering. It almost never works as intended..."
- "No, don't say it"
- "... I think that, if 'it' had a cure, you'd already received an offer. He can't - Godlike may it appear, but it still has limits."
- "I said you to shut up!" - by the look of it, Dana would likely have beaten Xanthi's ass on the spot. Knowing her sisters, if she was still "amped up", she would had a good shot at it, too... somehow, the thought that she could not, not any more at least, saddened Xanthippe.
- "Thanks for your time. Will you pass my message, when you can?"
- "Count on it."
And with that, the little half-Asian was out, with her athletic step as enticing as "Xanthippe's Molly" lazy stroll was.
- "If you care to join me, the veal is marvellous, here." - The words were spoken plainly - after all, "Razor" probably had the same kind of hearing that Xanthippe had, able to listen a child whisper in a storm five km away.
The new arrived moved the chair to sit, and Xanthippe looked up and stopped. This was "razor" - Xanthippe had decided to call this most murderous of the "Mollys" with that name, because she often had a bloody sword on her shoulders - but the girl gave out no hint of her usual, "I shall slay you viciously" energy.
Without it, Xanthippe realized that she was younger, way younger than Molly, as this later was probably from a prototype batch.
Xanthippe suspected that fine-tuning the growth of a super-powered child so that she became useful, crazy enough to do what was commanded to her independently of the horror it represented, but sane enough to not lose control and start killing on her own, was an art that required attention and luck. The second meaning that, for each sisters she had met many, many other had likely been slaughtered when they proved too unstable.
The waitress appeared, to take a restaurant order, an eyebrow raised at the newcomer.
- "I have a penchant for twin sisters" - Xanthippe had long since learned that, on this planet, one could survive any embarrassing situation, as long as she was the first making fun of it.
- "Who doesn't? The difficult is getting them in bed together." - The waitress took their order, while "razor" continued to be flabbergasted.
- "It wasn't so bad a joke."
- "I am not used to people joking around me."
"Because you usually look like considering the fastest way to disembowel them, girl" - the thought didn't reach Xanthippe's lips.
Then, the leather-clad alien vixen considered the air that her potential assassin sported at the moment, and sighed.
Why the Hell even this had to be a clueless, naïve girl at heart? Xanthippe lived much better when she could simply file her under "crazy assassin bitch".
Xanthippe blurted - "Today you look much prettier than usual" - and it was true.
- " Do you really think that we can't help - what's his name?- Simon?"
Xanthippe attacked the veal - 450 calories that would take ten days to consume, with her absurd metabolism, or eight round trips to the North Pole at Mach 3 - fully conscious that her thighs didn't really need any more fat, if she wanted to be able to slid inside her "leather" armour suit.
- "Do tell me, wouldn't your people already have offered that barter, if 'It' could fix the man?"
- "He is going to die" - "Razor" looked at least as shocked as her sister, which most definitely surprised the alien.
- "What is he, for you to care?"
- "He is someone that made my beloved sister happy - that made me happy, for a while, before I conceded defeat to Dana."
- "You still have feelings for him?"
The subsequent, prolonged silence eloquently answered "yes".
They finished the meal, exchanging barely a word, then walked out of the restaurant, together - the short, black-haired "potentiated" girl still lost in her thoughts.
They took the causeway across the main road, to the old Mulry Square.
The place, as always, was semi-desert. Near the centre of the triangular space, "Razor" stopped, forcing Xanthippe to look back - the girl had a sad, sweet expression.
- "Simon, Dana - I love them both, dearly." - and with this, she jumped out at the ludicrous acceleration rate that was the hallmark of the "suppa-girls", being well on a suborbital path by the time Xanthippe lost her.
Xanthippe looked around - if anybody saw the scene, his or her brain hardly registered it.
The alien, whose take off were considerably slower - her maximum acceleration was about a tenth of the 500G or so that Razor and her sisters used habitually - repressed a bout of envy.
She considered the fastidious spectacle of the humans around the square, pointing fingers at her when SHE would take off, and decided to go back to the legation office the hard way. Walking.
Which would burn about 1 pico-calories of fat , in her stupid matter-energy converting muscles.
----
For some months, Xanthippe had no reasons to linger on the other "normal" Molly, her lover and their tragic history.
She decided to not mobilise any official resource, to check what it was of the two.
Apparently, the only result of the encounter was that, now, the "mob-style" menaces were delivered by the first Molly that she ever met, the stealthy young girl that Xanthippe nicknamed "Insider".
"Razor" was much better at it, probably being a fan of "Goodfellas", "the Goodfater", "Lucky Luciano" and "Life and deaths of Pasquale Barra" - Insider simply didn't emanate the right danger. Yet, "Razor" was, probably, simply unwilling to meet again someone who had seen all her vulnerability.
So, in her obliviousness, Xanthippe did not know that Simon Oersteheld, a famous acrobat, had died aged 32, because of a debilitating illness, and did not prepare for the apparition of any grief-stricken, crazed acrobat female entering her suburban villa.
Like a remorseful thought, Dana appeared by the border of their big pool, scaring the hell out of the Betan, who didn't really want her beloved girlfriend to discover the whole clones business any more than any other of the involved.
The exception, it appeared, was Dana - was she there to shatter Molly's life? To punish her sisterhood, for not helping her lover?
In less than a second, Xanthippe was in front of the diminutive girl, realizing at the same time that she couldn't really force herself to hurt the poor woman.
- "Let me pass"
- "You know that I can't."
- "Why? So she can continue believing that she is the one and only Molly, an that there is nothing odd in her life?"
- "It seems a good idea"
- "Apart sharing her bed with the only accredited superwoman in the world?"
- "What do you mean?"
- "You got to her because you were tracking down one of us, no? Would she be happy, to know that she is just a replacement for the real deal?"
- "it is not like this" - A small part of Xanthippe, though, was telling her that it was exactly like that, which is why the super-strong woman lost control, for one of the very few times in her life. She gripped the trespasser's forearm, and squeezed a little too much, forgetting that this was NOT one of the much tougher than steel sisters of her lover. The sound of the acrobat's radio breaking filled Xanthippe's heart with horror.
- "Oh, my Gods, I didn't mean it. I " - she never managed to complete the phrase, as something emerged from the shadows and punched her away, with the kind of blow that would dwarf one from Mjolnir, the fabled hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor.
The punch was an hook from high-down, given by a flying, much enraged Razor - Xanthippe landed in the pool, blowing half of the water against the house front, like a localized tsunami, while the super-resistant woman stopped the flight a good meter into the ground, after having broken through the reinforced concrete wall of the pool.
For the first time in her life, Xanthippe lost consciousness without being in a Dojo with nullifying fields.
When she get back in herself - maybe fifteen seconds later - she steamed toward her enemies, only to see a somewhat odd scene.
Two Mollys - one looked like "Insider", the other was a yet unknown sister - were keeping Razor from finishing her job. Dana was apathetic, her broken arm twisted in an odd way - a sight that immediately sobered up Xanthippe.
That was her doing .- a poor girl, bereft for the loss of her life's love, had made a mistake and Xanthi had lost it, and hurt someone that did not merit being harmed, just because that someone may had stepped onto a truth.
With her clarity back, Xanthi realized that the quartet was being illuminated, by a handheld torch of some kind. Their expressions were very much the ones of a bunch of deers crossing a highway, in Montana, in the middle of the Hunting season.
She turned back, slowly, and smiled at "her" Molly, that did not look very amused.
- "Do you know these women?"
- "Kind of, dear."
Xanthippe suddenly felt like some male protagonist of one of the old movies that Molly insisted on watching together, when caught by his wife with a host of scantly dressed girls, out of some ungodly coincidence.
Apart the details that they were all women, dressed up from neck to toe - it was a chilly April evening, and "supers" may survive skinny dip in liquid nitrogen, but they do feel cold like anybody else - that it was no coincidence that they were all together and that there was no sex involved, Xanthi was exactly on the mark.
As any of those fictional husbands, she was in deep trouble.
Molly darted back and forth the lamplight, on each of her doubles and on her wife, and back.
Then, she switched to the house - the water wall had broken inside, trashing the ground floor. Molly herself was dripping wet, which kind of prompted a secondary but intriguing question.
- "Uh,Molly, have you ever had... that?" - the torch was, in fact, attached to the barrel of a pretty menacing gun. Not that it could hurt anybody there, apart Molly. And Dana.
- "Woman, do you have an idea of how many ass-holes send me messages, to tell me that they are going to convert me back to Earth cocks, ever since we started going out?"
- "12746, as of last week"
- "So, you do know"
- "Yes. Would you mind put it down? The only non-bullet-proof in this mess is that girl - she has suffered enough and I do not think that she is any danger."
If seeing Dana's broken arm calmed down Xanthippe, seeing a dripping Molly had the same effect on Razor.
- "May I suggest that we take the discussion to a more comfortable place?"
- "That's a nice idea, but, as you can see, our home is a bit in disarray." - The voice of Molly was pretty dry. Xanthippe wondered what her wife was thinking, seeing four sisters she knew nothing about, yet were familiar with her life-partner.
- "We have a safe house, down the road. It is big enough for everybody. And it is warm - we love warmth."
Molly looked interrogatively at Xanthippe, who shrugged.
- "Me, I am not sure, but they would never, ever harm you, dear, believe me."
Molly shook her head - "I should really have listen to my room-mate" - lowered her gun, and the whole group went to the safe house - flying.
The safe house was big, and it was warm. Very warm.
Razor distended Dana on the central sofa - that looked every bit as comfortable as much as expensive - and took her arm, pulled, and managed to compose the fracture., while Insider laid her hands on the sides of the acrobat's head. Probably the shock hadn't wore off yet, and the ex-super kept looking vaguely giddy.
Xanthippe imagined that the "amped-up" girl could see the bones under the skin every bit as well as she did. When the black-haired girl continued her manipulations, till she managed to put back in place a solitary splinter, the Betan was sure of it.
The unknown sister arrived, with a strange jar that she left to razor, and went on to Molly
- "We gotta change you out of this"
Molly went away, more than a bit surprised, pulled by the enthusiastic little woman.
Razor took the content of the jar - seemingly, a greenish slime - with her hand, and laid it against her sister's arm. The slime soon ran up and down the arm, and meld itself in the shape of a cast.
Razor made a sign to Insider and, in a matter of seconds, Dana was sleeping.
-"Psychic powers?"
- "Nope - we simply have the codes to reactivate her dormant implants, and command them specific actions." - Insider was almost cheerful - "so, sleepy sleepy and pain locked out, while the nanos fix her bones. In a couple of days she will be as good as new."
- "I am sorry"
- "It happens - I have broken far too many bones not to know it"
Razor led herself fall in he second, unoccupied of the three sofas.
- "Sorry for my punch - you didn't completely earn it. She was looking for a fight, though she was right. "
- "Molly has seen you guys. What do we tell her?"
Razor looked Xanthippe for some seconds, raised her eyebrows, looking at once more childish and adult.
- "The truth, what else? Ignorance isn't going to protect her. After all, YOU jumped on her because of us."
- "What if she decides that I really was using her to get insights on you people? What if she leaves me?"
- "I finally get to kill you, my dear, like you richly deserved."
The day after, much explanation was given -Xanthi managed to convince Molly of her innocence. Molly was intrigued by these unknown sisters, and decided to learn as much as possible, possibly from the most independent source, the "Sleeping beauty".
So, she decided to "haunt" the safe house for a while.
Of course, as any choice in life, it was bound to have consequences.
Like meeting her other five "sisters", and decide that she loved them all... at which point, Xanthippe finally knew in how much of a deep shit she really was.
As always when it was raining along her flightpath, she was wearing her hood with rotor-glasses. No normal human would ever use something like those, but the Woman of Titanium was not really normal, wasn't she?
She had felt the presence of the intruder from half a km away - however, the building security system was also aware of this visitor, too, which meant that this girl was likely not moved by bad intentions, or completely ineffectual.
The girl - now looking at a glass close full of starships models - was a Molly, one of an unknown number of clone-sisters among whom was Xanthippe's lover, The First Molly.
- "I hope that you have no problem, finding my office, Molly."
The short woman turned around, her face flushed bright red.
Xanthippe's mind registered the dance of the muscles below the brownish skin - this was Molly, all right, as she would be if her favoured past-time was running under the Sun with weights on wrists and ankles and not lying on a sofa, reading some old book. Xanthippe felt a wave of attraction for this "improved" lookalike of her lover - whatever this girl was, she didn't let out the same subliminal, homicidal tension of some of her brethren.
- "Uh, yes. When I entered the building, some nice woman asked me if I was here to see you, and guided me to this place"
- "I suppose you only heard the voice of this woman." - on friday afternoon, Xanthippe was usually the only one to be in the office, as local Earthlings had problems getting the 25 hours a week Anipos' Legation working schedule, and many so-called entrepreneurs kept getting angry when they couldn't reach the Legation secretary/liaison officer for Earthbound affairs in old plain office hours.
Xanthippe had tried to explain - plenty of times - that Anipos Prime functioned under a strict 16 hours/week maximum allowed workload law - working more than that was considered "job hoarding", an offense punished with three months of jail for every supernumerary hour/week worked, and with the requisition of all "ill-gotten" wealth.
Of course, 16 hours/week was already more than the planet ecosystem could safely support, and should have already been reduced to 12, if not for the fear that people would turn to hobbies even more resources-wasting than work, out of sheer boredom.
That being the case, Anipos workers were encouraged to slack off as much as possible... with scarce results. "Giving you best at work" was widely considered the best remedy to depression and existential ennuis, so the Anipos tended to assault their sixteen hours jobs like they were in a marathon.
In a galaxy full of long established civilizations that had to learn that there was no practical way to relieve ecological pressures through other-worlds expansion, the Anipos' choice wasn't even the worst scenario.
They still managed to keep their 600 millions inhabitants reasonably happy and busy.
Other worlds had simply written off whole underclasses and social strata - often, several billions citizens of them - through the institution of severely demanding policies for the release of reproduction permits.
Not as much "kill the poor" as "let them die off, childless".
- "It was the building's automation control, Molly." - Xanthippe managed to keep any sarcasm out of her voice... the other Molly may be sophisticated players in "the Game", but this one was possibly made of a different material. Xanthippe shared her bed with another "different Molly", so she knew that it was entirely possible.
- "My name is Dana."
- "I thought that it was Molly, like your sisters."
- "Dana, call me Dana."
The young woman seemed distressed, in a very human way - nothing tingled on Xanthippe super-human senses.
- "So, who are you? A spy? An enforcer? An assassin? Don't tell me, an existentialist poet?"
The banterous question irritated the girl, which was fine - Xanthippe and the building still didn't perceive the host of odd forces and sensor probes that surrounded all of Molly's sisters. This one was either human, or had better self-control than any of her sisters.
- "I... this was a mistake." - And like this, she ran away - at less than 30 km/h. A speed that wasn't even worth the "paltry" adjective, for Xanthippe standards.
The Betan woman considered it for a couple of seconds, then stepped out from the window.
The black haired kid took some seconds more to come out of the Legation office building - she was fast, for a normal human, and continued half-walking, half-running, till the Legation building was well out of sight.
At which point, she bent against a wall and started crying.
- "So, you are not a poet, What do you do?"
Dana, startled, looked up, tears running her mascara and a question written in her stare - how the hell Xanthippe was there? Xanthi found her almost irresistible - a Molly with some deeper feelings? Oh, my.
- "I am much slower than your sisters, but so are you. So, who are you, and what do you do?"
- "I am an acrobat with the "Cirque Orferes""
- "Can you fly?" - the little woman shook her head - "No", while cleaning her tears with a hand, making even more of a mess of her face
- "OK, I can walk, and I'd like to walk you to The Bretwitch Canteen, two blocks from here. Would you accept to dine with me?"
The Molly looked at her, incredulous, then nodded
- "Good - and we will discuss what disturbs you so much."
The Bretwitch was a much younger institution than it stated in the logo - it started as a Kosher Deli takeaway right before the middle of 21st century, and it wasn't the best place to dine in town.
However it was affordable, the cuisine was decent and it also had a great anti-paparazzi policy.
Most of the clients were mobsters, not above disappearing the photographer that took the wrong photo. Other clients were way worse, and didn't leave corpses for the families to mourn. Arguably, Xanthippe was among said others, profile-wise, even if she did not kill people directly.
As in a badly written book, Dana's acrobat lover, a certain Simon, had fallen ill.
The illness was genetic, incurable and fatal - one of those 6000 or so ailments that were so rare that hardly anybody studied them, and virtually no money was invested in a cure. Unfortunately, a great number of these illnesses resulted from genetic mutations intervened after the lost of hyper-travel had fragmented the human Galaxy in its current form, some 50000 years before - no cures could be found on other worlds, as the rest of humanities didn't share the relevant mutations. .
Simon was the guy for whom Dana had bailed out of "The Other" organization.
- "Really? You simply took, said 'To hell with this', and walked out?" - Xanthippe was amazed - "No repercussions?".
- "I couldn't fly any more, or remember half of the days from before I left the group." - Dana looked out of the window, probably to hide the pain in her own eyes from the inquisitive alien - "It took me months, to learn how to move with only my muscles. 'It' had no reasons to kill me - I was a good example of what happened when one left its service."
So, "it" didn't broke her knees... simply because it would have been redundant.
She fixed her glare on Xanthippe, suddenly - "I think that I would have killed me, if not for Simon."
Her eyes took on a liquid light, as if she was just one step from openly crying - which she probably was.
- "And he took you as a partner in the acrobatic act, too?"
- "Turns out, the `pale shadow of what I was is still good enough to learn to walk on a rope. I am small, but strong, and my reflexes are still good."
Xanthippe didn't vouch his ideas on this last detail - the tune-ups that made Dana's brain able to perform at "hyper-high speed" were the kind of biological machinery that couldn't really be removed, at least not without converting someone into a vegetal.
As such, while her body could have been downgraded to be only human (maybe), her reflexes were still - probably - very fast, bordering on absurdly rapid.
- "Why were you in my office?"
- "I have seen a gossip article in a magazine, you with your... last lover. The first of us" - the "real" Molly... Xanthippe had realized, at the very beginning , that none of the clones realized that "her" Molly, too, was a clone - possibly, one from a `previous batch.
An unmodified one, with no cybernetic black-boxes stuffed inside, who had been allowed to grow on her own terms in an adoptive family... but the methylation markers, the telomeres shortening and other indices were there.
She was not the original Molly, either.
Most likely, the last one in a "control group" of "naturals" that had been dispersed and used - as base reference - to steer the development of the "souped-up" versions.
All of them, clones of the same girl, that likely was 11 when her material was sampled, some moment half the first quarter of the previous century.
It was, possibly, also the reason why they all had roughly the same age - the bio-techs had found no indices that they were rapid-grown in a vat.
That was a trick nobody, in the whole galaxy, had ever managed to pull satisfactorily - at least, not without extensive genetic modifications, liable to wreak systemic havocs down the poor kid.
The "Mollys" really were, all, sisters - twins.
But the "supers", for some reason, had convinced themselves that their "known" normal sister was, really, the source.
Xanthippe suspected that this shaped a lot of their existential narrative - in fact, "the Assassin" had hinted, in one of her late night incursions, about what could happen if ever Xanthippe made Molly cry.
To be honest, the Woman of Titanium slept badly for a week or so, after that... her relationship with the unsuspecting girl was a trilling, double edged challenge.
- "Do you want to meet her?"
- "No, I want to let my... former employer know that I am available to come back, if he can cure Simon."
- "Why coming to me? Just send a phone call to " - Xanthippe paused, while she reflected on it - "my office. I am pretty sure that 'it' wiretapped any cable in and out of it, the very moment that they were laid down".
- "So did the US Government, and the NSSSR, the United Nations Intelligence Directorate, the three Republics of China, Japan, South Korea, the EU Global Intelligence Agency, the..."
Dana may have lost half of what made her whatever she was, before her escape to freedom, but apparently she still understood enough of "the game" to avoid the most obvious blunders.
- "Stop, I get it. Publicizing your former nature as an affiliate of the 'Greatest World Terroristic Network', among the fine listeners of my channel, would not improve your friend's health. Whereas, human intelligence around the legation is virtually nil, given the building's AI bad habits."
- "Nowadays, Intelligence agencies seldom invest more than a tiny percentage of their budget in 'foot soldiers'. So, entering the building was safer than calling on the phone, no?"
Not exact, but almost.
Xanthippe couldn't help but think that this was because most "global threats" surrounding the Legation, as perceived by the various nation-states, were not humans in nature.
Yet, it was a mistake... the 'bots in the space kept almost all their point-to-point links well away from the Earth space, but those of them that had longer maintained an android avatar on Earth did met through them, at a couple of bars, and chatted about work.
It costed her a lot to discover this, and the old Russian operatives that stalked the two bars since she had pinned down their locations were her most conspicuous infraction to the Legation budget integrity, but it was also the way she got most of her useful information on the "hidden alien threats operating on the planet".
What her chief then really did with her reports, Xanthippe had some clue, and she gladly ignored it.
If the boss preferred printed reports as toilet paper, it was not her fault.
A sudden, low buzz caught her attention. She recognized the ultrasound feed, from quite a few of her most worrying recent moments. "Razor", the most murderous of the "sisters", was near.
- "So, you hope that I pass the message to one of them? That you are ready to come back to the fold, in exchange for saving Simon?"
-·"Yes."
- "It is not going to work."
- "Why? ... I am sure that they already know that I contacted you."
- "I am sure that they already knew everything about Simon. I do not think that your 'Boss' can do anything for him."
- "What? No. It can do everything it want! It does everything it wants!"
- "Reprogramming a broken genetic code in an adult body is much more difficult than assembling a cyborg on a developing foetus, or embryonic genetic engineering. It almost never works as intended..."
- "No, don't say it"
- "... I think that, if 'it' had a cure, you'd already received an offer. He can't - Godlike may it appear, but it still has limits."
- "I said you to shut up!" - by the look of it, Dana would likely have beaten Xanthi's ass on the spot. Knowing her sisters, if she was still "amped up", she would had a good shot at it, too... somehow, the thought that she could not, not any more at least, saddened Xanthippe.
- "Thanks for your time. Will you pass my message, when you can?"
- "Count on it."
And with that, the little half-Asian was out, with her athletic step as enticing as "Xanthippe's Molly" lazy stroll was.
- "If you care to join me, the veal is marvellous, here." - The words were spoken plainly - after all, "Razor" probably had the same kind of hearing that Xanthippe had, able to listen a child whisper in a storm five km away.
The new arrived moved the chair to sit, and Xanthippe looked up and stopped. This was "razor" - Xanthippe had decided to call this most murderous of the "Mollys" with that name, because she often had a bloody sword on her shoulders - but the girl gave out no hint of her usual, "I shall slay you viciously" energy.
Without it, Xanthippe realized that she was younger, way younger than Molly, as this later was probably from a prototype batch.
Xanthippe suspected that fine-tuning the growth of a super-powered child so that she became useful, crazy enough to do what was commanded to her independently of the horror it represented, but sane enough to not lose control and start killing on her own, was an art that required attention and luck. The second meaning that, for each sisters she had met many, many other had likely been slaughtered when they proved too unstable.
The waitress appeared, to take a restaurant order, an eyebrow raised at the newcomer.
- "I have a penchant for twin sisters" - Xanthippe had long since learned that, on this planet, one could survive any embarrassing situation, as long as she was the first making fun of it.
- "Who doesn't? The difficult is getting them in bed together." - The waitress took their order, while "razor" continued to be flabbergasted.
- "It wasn't so bad a joke."
- "I am not used to people joking around me."
"Because you usually look like considering the fastest way to disembowel them, girl" - the thought didn't reach Xanthippe's lips.
Then, the leather-clad alien vixen considered the air that her potential assassin sported at the moment, and sighed.
Why the Hell even this had to be a clueless, naïve girl at heart? Xanthippe lived much better when she could simply file her under "crazy assassin bitch".
Xanthippe blurted - "Today you look much prettier than usual" - and it was true.
- " Do you really think that we can't help - what's his name?- Simon?"
Xanthippe attacked the veal - 450 calories that would take ten days to consume, with her absurd metabolism, or eight round trips to the North Pole at Mach 3 - fully conscious that her thighs didn't really need any more fat, if she wanted to be able to slid inside her "leather" armour suit.
- "Do tell me, wouldn't your people already have offered that barter, if 'It' could fix the man?"
- "He is going to die" - "Razor" looked at least as shocked as her sister, which most definitely surprised the alien.
- "What is he, for you to care?"
- "He is someone that made my beloved sister happy - that made me happy, for a while, before I conceded defeat to Dana."
- "You still have feelings for him?"
The subsequent, prolonged silence eloquently answered "yes".
They finished the meal, exchanging barely a word, then walked out of the restaurant, together - the short, black-haired "potentiated" girl still lost in her thoughts.
They took the causeway across the main road, to the old Mulry Square.
The place, as always, was semi-desert. Near the centre of the triangular space, "Razor" stopped, forcing Xanthippe to look back - the girl had a sad, sweet expression.
- "Simon, Dana - I love them both, dearly." - and with this, she jumped out at the ludicrous acceleration rate that was the hallmark of the "suppa-girls", being well on a suborbital path by the time Xanthippe lost her.
Xanthippe looked around - if anybody saw the scene, his or her brain hardly registered it.
The alien, whose take off were considerably slower - her maximum acceleration was about a tenth of the 500G or so that Razor and her sisters used habitually - repressed a bout of envy.
She considered the fastidious spectacle of the humans around the square, pointing fingers at her when SHE would take off, and decided to go back to the legation office the hard way. Walking.
Which would burn about 1 pico-calories of fat , in her stupid matter-energy converting muscles.
----
For some months, Xanthippe had no reasons to linger on the other "normal" Molly, her lover and their tragic history.
She decided to not mobilise any official resource, to check what it was of the two.
Apparently, the only result of the encounter was that, now, the "mob-style" menaces were delivered by the first Molly that she ever met, the stealthy young girl that Xanthippe nicknamed "Insider".
"Razor" was much better at it, probably being a fan of "Goodfellas", "the Goodfater", "Lucky Luciano" and "Life and deaths of Pasquale Barra" - Insider simply didn't emanate the right danger. Yet, "Razor" was, probably, simply unwilling to meet again someone who had seen all her vulnerability.
So, in her obliviousness, Xanthippe did not know that Simon Oersteheld, a famous acrobat, had died aged 32, because of a debilitating illness, and did not prepare for the apparition of any grief-stricken, crazed acrobat female entering her suburban villa.
Like a remorseful thought, Dana appeared by the border of their big pool, scaring the hell out of the Betan, who didn't really want her beloved girlfriend to discover the whole clones business any more than any other of the involved.
The exception, it appeared, was Dana - was she there to shatter Molly's life? To punish her sisterhood, for not helping her lover?
In less than a second, Xanthippe was in front of the diminutive girl, realizing at the same time that she couldn't really force herself to hurt the poor woman.
- "Let me pass"
- "You know that I can't."
- "Why? So she can continue believing that she is the one and only Molly, an that there is nothing odd in her life?"
- "It seems a good idea"
- "Apart sharing her bed with the only accredited superwoman in the world?"
- "What do you mean?"
- "You got to her because you were tracking down one of us, no? Would she be happy, to know that she is just a replacement for the real deal?"
- "it is not like this" - A small part of Xanthippe, though, was telling her that it was exactly like that, which is why the super-strong woman lost control, for one of the very few times in her life. She gripped the trespasser's forearm, and squeezed a little too much, forgetting that this was NOT one of the much tougher than steel sisters of her lover. The sound of the acrobat's radio breaking filled Xanthippe's heart with horror.
- "Oh, my Gods, I didn't mean it. I " - she never managed to complete the phrase, as something emerged from the shadows and punched her away, with the kind of blow that would dwarf one from Mjolnir, the fabled hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor.
The punch was an hook from high-down, given by a flying, much enraged Razor - Xanthippe landed in the pool, blowing half of the water against the house front, like a localized tsunami, while the super-resistant woman stopped the flight a good meter into the ground, after having broken through the reinforced concrete wall of the pool.
For the first time in her life, Xanthippe lost consciousness without being in a Dojo with nullifying fields.
When she get back in herself - maybe fifteen seconds later - she steamed toward her enemies, only to see a somewhat odd scene.
Two Mollys - one looked like "Insider", the other was a yet unknown sister - were keeping Razor from finishing her job. Dana was apathetic, her broken arm twisted in an odd way - a sight that immediately sobered up Xanthippe.
That was her doing .- a poor girl, bereft for the loss of her life's love, had made a mistake and Xanthi had lost it, and hurt someone that did not merit being harmed, just because that someone may had stepped onto a truth.
With her clarity back, Xanthi realized that the quartet was being illuminated, by a handheld torch of some kind. Their expressions were very much the ones of a bunch of deers crossing a highway, in Montana, in the middle of the Hunting season.
She turned back, slowly, and smiled at "her" Molly, that did not look very amused.
- "Do you know these women?"
- "Kind of, dear."
Xanthippe suddenly felt like some male protagonist of one of the old movies that Molly insisted on watching together, when caught by his wife with a host of scantly dressed girls, out of some ungodly coincidence.
Apart the details that they were all women, dressed up from neck to toe - it was a chilly April evening, and "supers" may survive skinny dip in liquid nitrogen, but they do feel cold like anybody else - that it was no coincidence that they were all together and that there was no sex involved, Xanthi was exactly on the mark.
As any of those fictional husbands, she was in deep trouble.
Molly darted back and forth the lamplight, on each of her doubles and on her wife, and back.
Then, she switched to the house - the water wall had broken inside, trashing the ground floor. Molly herself was dripping wet, which kind of prompted a secondary but intriguing question.
- "Uh,Molly, have you ever had... that?" - the torch was, in fact, attached to the barrel of a pretty menacing gun. Not that it could hurt anybody there, apart Molly. And Dana.
- "Woman, do you have an idea of how many ass-holes send me messages, to tell me that they are going to convert me back to Earth cocks, ever since we started going out?"
- "12746, as of last week"
- "So, you do know"
- "Yes. Would you mind put it down? The only non-bullet-proof in this mess is that girl - she has suffered enough and I do not think that she is any danger."
If seeing Dana's broken arm calmed down Xanthippe, seeing a dripping Molly had the same effect on Razor.
- "May I suggest that we take the discussion to a more comfortable place?"
- "That's a nice idea, but, as you can see, our home is a bit in disarray." - The voice of Molly was pretty dry. Xanthippe wondered what her wife was thinking, seeing four sisters she knew nothing about, yet were familiar with her life-partner.
- "We have a safe house, down the road. It is big enough for everybody. And it is warm - we love warmth."
Molly looked interrogatively at Xanthippe, who shrugged.
- "Me, I am not sure, but they would never, ever harm you, dear, believe me."
Molly shook her head - "I should really have listen to my room-mate" - lowered her gun, and the whole group went to the safe house - flying.
The safe house was big, and it was warm. Very warm.
Razor distended Dana on the central sofa - that looked every bit as comfortable as much as expensive - and took her arm, pulled, and managed to compose the fracture., while Insider laid her hands on the sides of the acrobat's head. Probably the shock hadn't wore off yet, and the ex-super kept looking vaguely giddy.
Xanthippe imagined that the "amped-up" girl could see the bones under the skin every bit as well as she did. When the black-haired girl continued her manipulations, till she managed to put back in place a solitary splinter, the Betan was sure of it.
The unknown sister arrived, with a strange jar that she left to razor, and went on to Molly
- "We gotta change you out of this"
Molly went away, more than a bit surprised, pulled by the enthusiastic little woman.
Razor took the content of the jar - seemingly, a greenish slime - with her hand, and laid it against her sister's arm. The slime soon ran up and down the arm, and meld itself in the shape of a cast.
Razor made a sign to Insider and, in a matter of seconds, Dana was sleeping.
-"Psychic powers?"
- "Nope - we simply have the codes to reactivate her dormant implants, and command them specific actions." - Insider was almost cheerful - "so, sleepy sleepy and pain locked out, while the nanos fix her bones. In a couple of days she will be as good as new."
- "I am sorry"
- "It happens - I have broken far too many bones not to know it"
Razor led herself fall in he second, unoccupied of the three sofas.
- "Sorry for my punch - you didn't completely earn it. She was looking for a fight, though she was right. "
- "Molly has seen you guys. What do we tell her?"
Razor looked Xanthippe for some seconds, raised her eyebrows, looking at once more childish and adult.
- "The truth, what else? Ignorance isn't going to protect her. After all, YOU jumped on her because of us."
- "What if she decides that I really was using her to get insights on you people? What if she leaves me?"
- "I finally get to kill you, my dear, like you richly deserved."
The day after, much explanation was given -Xanthi managed to convince Molly of her innocence. Molly was intrigued by these unknown sisters, and decided to learn as much as possible, possibly from the most independent source, the "Sleeping beauty".
So, she decided to "haunt" the safe house for a while.
Of course, as any choice in life, it was bound to have consequences.
Like meeting her other five "sisters", and decide that she loved them all... at which point, Xanthippe finally knew in how much of a deep shit she really was.
Monday, 28 November 2016
War
War is a sterile exercise, a waste of resources, and the source of a great quantity of pain.
It always been so, for all the length of human history.
Yet, there has hardly been a whole year without war, in the history of the world.
Or, if you like more restricted geographical scope, a whole decade without war in Europe, before the long peace period after WWII.
Why?
Is it a perversion of the human species?Yes, and no. It is an un- perversion of manhood.
In the past, I have wrote about these crazy idea of mines that the structured, complex society - anything with more inhabitants than the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers village is bound to have one - is more functional to the female biologic imperative than to the male one.
Actually, the more structured and stable it became, less and less space it left to the original nucleus of men instincts, that would be... fuck anything in sight, and go on to the next.
This is coming to the point that, if one takes a step back and look dispassionately to modern western societies and much of their social discourse, the impression arise that these are actually trying to castrate their males as fair as possible.
These do so by branding the strand of aggressiveness associated to their higher testosterone levels as inherently dangerous, curtailing the actual spaces of sexual extroversion allowed to males that aren't directly tied to female's sexual satisfaction , and generally downsizing the need for the male gender workforce by a crescent automation, both in work and in the state-controlled exercise of violence (police, the military).
The emphasis on drones may be seen, so, not only about reducing military personnel losses - though, it is argued that drones are a supremely inefficient use of resources, as the rate of unintended death that they produce is above 90%, they are not very reliable and they do not come cheap either - but also about reducing the dependency of military action on violence-capable males - currently, these are still the bulk of fighting units personnel...
Opening the ranks to women was yet another step in that direction.
The fact that the higher echelons of said societies are still, mostly, occupied by Alpha males kind of obscure this evolution, but it can't really hide it.
Modern societies are becoming more and more feminized.
The future is the metro-sexual male, no matter how many of our great-grandfather would spit on one, if they met him in the street.
It is not bad for the many males that do not really have high levels of aggressiveness, it is not bad for the Alphas that manage to get a handle of how their social system works and exploit its weaknesses, it is quite good for many women.
But this "feminine slant" of structured society has always been a source of frustration for a sizeable portion of men, the ones with both higher aggressive tendencies and less social clout, the ones that had less to gain and more to lose - in term of unrewarded violation of their base instincts - by accepting their society and its rules.
These have always been amenable, along human history, to take arms and go to war and, hopefully, get killed in the process...
To be honest, they mostly went to Pillage, Arson and Rape (PAR) the hell out of some neighbour, for the sake of showing that they had balls.
I like to argue that, in many ways, the cruelty of war has grown alongside the development of societies, due to the increased efficacy of the weapons that they could build, but also to the increased level of stress that "order" imposed on this part of the male population.
Also, a multiple centuries long effort from the ruling classes to isolate the fighters from seeing the true consequences of their action - usually by dehumanizing their adversaries through ideological fallacies - powerfully contributed to it.
So, during a few millennia we have gone from squabbles among neighbours where a lot of screams were shouted, balls were showed and little to no blood was shed, to the carnage of WWI and of its natural sequel, WWII.
Which is where the mechanics of "traditional war" broke down - at least for European countries, for some decades (but as witnesses are dying and losing weight, the same old idiocies that cause those bloodbath may come back).
Traditional war involved mostly professional soldiers - men that would likely become thugs, otherwise, and often reversed to a thug life the very moment that they were laid off - that were allowed a great degree of freedom in their war action, occasionally being afforded looting or raping on the enemy population. Most of the deaths came through illnesses, though, but the actual PAR/Deaths ratio was relatively good.
WWI was a conscripts war, that involved a much vaster strata of the male population and literally burned it on the altar of ideas that many of them hardly understood - the national ideal made not necessarily sense to all, back then... God knows most Italians, today, do not really get what Italy is, and couldn't care less about it anyway, for example; my German-speaking, stone carving great grandfather died without understanding why he was killing the very same guys with whom he had worked many a summer, and he was not alone in the sentiment - for little of no "remuneration".
The soldier deaths and casualties were out of scale with the PAR allowed, which was nearly none.
WWII was essentially an affair of WWI survivors, getting from their own societies what they could not get from the war... the scarred veterans unwilling to let violence down were the backbones of both the Fascism, in Italy, and, later, Nazism in Germany.
The very Adolf Hitler was an example of them - a veteran that fought, with courage, in a horrific war and did not get much out of it.
WWII, on the other hand, was the moment were another mainstay of "traditional war" was lost - soldiers were held responsible for the crimes that they committed during war activities, no matter if these were done following orders. Before the Nuremberg trials, "I was following orders" was a widely accepted defence for many an indefensible action.
Also, it was the final nail in the coffin for another of the tenets of "traditional war" - war among modern states proved to be a far nastier affair, for the societies that waged it, than any of the precedent wars.
The destruction arrived everywhere, the society was disrupted more thoroughly than it had ever been, and the very economy of he warring countries had to be centralized and bent to fulfil war needs (kind of... the 3rd Reich and Italy unsurprisingly failed to rein in their oligarchic industrialists with the efficiency the UK and USA showed; regimes always pays cash for the support they get), to an extent never seen before - or since.
"Modern war" proved to be such a sorry affair, that it could not be repeated any time soon, at least as long as those that had lived it were around and had any power to impede it.
However, not all the countries involved in the sordid squabble had to endure the same level of stress - it can be argued that the USA, for example, got it relatively lightly.
The USA lost 420.000 persons, during the war - 407000 soldiers, which is in line with the casualties of other countries that didn't participate in the Germany-USSR death-match, and 13000 civilians.
It suffered no attacks on its territory that are worth mentioning, and ended the whole shenanigan in far better economic shape than any of the European nations.
For the USA, in many ways, WWII had been yet another bit of "traditional war".
The Viet-Nam war became the moment where the USA had more of a taste of what a modern war is really like, in that it adsorbed a notable amount of its economic output, it deeply upset its society - courtesy of a not yet embedded-bridled media industry - and it democratically exposed members of its younger generations from various strata (with some dishonourable exception) to quite a selected choice of horrors.
It must come not as a surprise, then, that the USA military recognised the danger and took a set of steps to "de-modernize" the country experience of wars.
The USA Military is today made up of professionals, and exerts a tight control on the narrative that reaches the USA people from the front-lines of the wars that it had to fight, doing its level best to downplay and justify the damages that these have done on the target countries.
It doesn't recognize the International Tribunal for War Crimes, nor is it likely to recognize it in any foreseeable future, and it reserve the right to be the sole judge of eventual war crimes committed by its- own personnel.
Undoubtedly, today the USA look like a country intoxicated by a potentially dangerous military culture that has done its very best to rewind the clock, back to an era where war "made sense".
It rest to be seen how long this state of affairs will last, and how will it come to an end.
I really hope, some time after I died, thanks...
Of the candidates to world's sole superpower, USA is still, by far , the best (unless the UE finally gets its shit together, but I doubt it).
It always been so, for all the length of human history.
Yet, there has hardly been a whole year without war, in the history of the world.
Or, if you like more restricted geographical scope, a whole decade without war in Europe, before the long peace period after WWII.
Why?
Is it a perversion of the human species?Yes, and no. It is an un- perversion of manhood.
In the past, I have wrote about these crazy idea of mines that the structured, complex society - anything with more inhabitants than the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers village is bound to have one - is more functional to the female biologic imperative than to the male one.
Actually, the more structured and stable it became, less and less space it left to the original nucleus of men instincts, that would be... fuck anything in sight, and go on to the next.
This is coming to the point that, if one takes a step back and look dispassionately to modern western societies and much of their social discourse, the impression arise that these are actually trying to castrate their males as fair as possible.
These do so by branding the strand of aggressiveness associated to their higher testosterone levels as inherently dangerous, curtailing the actual spaces of sexual extroversion allowed to males that aren't directly tied to female's sexual satisfaction , and generally downsizing the need for the male gender workforce by a crescent automation, both in work and in the state-controlled exercise of violence (police, the military).
The emphasis on drones may be seen, so, not only about reducing military personnel losses - though, it is argued that drones are a supremely inefficient use of resources, as the rate of unintended death that they produce is above 90%, they are not very reliable and they do not come cheap either - but also about reducing the dependency of military action on violence-capable males - currently, these are still the bulk of fighting units personnel...
Opening the ranks to women was yet another step in that direction.
The fact that the higher echelons of said societies are still, mostly, occupied by Alpha males kind of obscure this evolution, but it can't really hide it.
Modern societies are becoming more and more feminized.
The future is the metro-sexual male, no matter how many of our great-grandfather would spit on one, if they met him in the street.
It is not bad for the many males that do not really have high levels of aggressiveness, it is not bad for the Alphas that manage to get a handle of how their social system works and exploit its weaknesses, it is quite good for many women.
But this "feminine slant" of structured society has always been a source of frustration for a sizeable portion of men, the ones with both higher aggressive tendencies and less social clout, the ones that had less to gain and more to lose - in term of unrewarded violation of their base instincts - by accepting their society and its rules.
These have always been amenable, along human history, to take arms and go to war and, hopefully, get killed in the process...
To be honest, they mostly went to Pillage, Arson and Rape (PAR) the hell out of some neighbour, for the sake of showing that they had balls.
I like to argue that, in many ways, the cruelty of war has grown alongside the development of societies, due to the increased efficacy of the weapons that they could build, but also to the increased level of stress that "order" imposed on this part of the male population.
Also, a multiple centuries long effort from the ruling classes to isolate the fighters from seeing the true consequences of their action - usually by dehumanizing their adversaries through ideological fallacies - powerfully contributed to it.
So, during a few millennia we have gone from squabbles among neighbours where a lot of screams were shouted, balls were showed and little to no blood was shed, to the carnage of WWI and of its natural sequel, WWII.
Which is where the mechanics of "traditional war" broke down - at least for European countries, for some decades (but as witnesses are dying and losing weight, the same old idiocies that cause those bloodbath may come back).
Traditional war involved mostly professional soldiers - men that would likely become thugs, otherwise, and often reversed to a thug life the very moment that they were laid off - that were allowed a great degree of freedom in their war action, occasionally being afforded looting or raping on the enemy population. Most of the deaths came through illnesses, though, but the actual PAR/Deaths ratio was relatively good.
WWI was a conscripts war, that involved a much vaster strata of the male population and literally burned it on the altar of ideas that many of them hardly understood - the national ideal made not necessarily sense to all, back then... God knows most Italians, today, do not really get what Italy is, and couldn't care less about it anyway, for example; my German-speaking, stone carving great grandfather died without understanding why he was killing the very same guys with whom he had worked many a summer, and he was not alone in the sentiment - for little of no "remuneration".
The soldier deaths and casualties were out of scale with the PAR allowed, which was nearly none.
WWII was essentially an affair of WWI survivors, getting from their own societies what they could not get from the war... the scarred veterans unwilling to let violence down were the backbones of both the Fascism, in Italy, and, later, Nazism in Germany.
The very Adolf Hitler was an example of them - a veteran that fought, with courage, in a horrific war and did not get much out of it.
WWII, on the other hand, was the moment were another mainstay of "traditional war" was lost - soldiers were held responsible for the crimes that they committed during war activities, no matter if these were done following orders. Before the Nuremberg trials, "I was following orders" was a widely accepted defence for many an indefensible action.
Also, it was the final nail in the coffin for another of the tenets of "traditional war" - war among modern states proved to be a far nastier affair, for the societies that waged it, than any of the precedent wars.
The destruction arrived everywhere, the society was disrupted more thoroughly than it had ever been, and the very economy of he warring countries had to be centralized and bent to fulfil war needs (kind of... the 3rd Reich and Italy unsurprisingly failed to rein in their oligarchic industrialists with the efficiency the UK and USA showed; regimes always pays cash for the support they get), to an extent never seen before - or since.
"Modern war" proved to be such a sorry affair, that it could not be repeated any time soon, at least as long as those that had lived it were around and had any power to impede it.
However, not all the countries involved in the sordid squabble had to endure the same level of stress - it can be argued that the USA, for example, got it relatively lightly.
The USA lost 420.000 persons, during the war - 407000 soldiers, which is in line with the casualties of other countries that didn't participate in the Germany-USSR death-match, and 13000 civilians.
It suffered no attacks on its territory that are worth mentioning, and ended the whole shenanigan in far better economic shape than any of the European nations.
For the USA, in many ways, WWII had been yet another bit of "traditional war".
The Viet-Nam war became the moment where the USA had more of a taste of what a modern war is really like, in that it adsorbed a notable amount of its economic output, it deeply upset its society - courtesy of a not yet embedded-bridled media industry - and it democratically exposed members of its younger generations from various strata (with some dishonourable exception) to quite a selected choice of horrors.
It must come not as a surprise, then, that the USA military recognised the danger and took a set of steps to "de-modernize" the country experience of wars.
The USA Military is today made up of professionals, and exerts a tight control on the narrative that reaches the USA people from the front-lines of the wars that it had to fight, doing its level best to downplay and justify the damages that these have done on the target countries.
It doesn't recognize the International Tribunal for War Crimes, nor is it likely to recognize it in any foreseeable future, and it reserve the right to be the sole judge of eventual war crimes committed by its- own personnel.
Undoubtedly, today the USA look like a country intoxicated by a potentially dangerous military culture that has done its very best to rewind the clock, back to an era where war "made sense".
It rest to be seen how long this state of affairs will last, and how will it come to an end.
I really hope, some time after I died, thanks...
Of the candidates to world's sole superpower, USA is still, by far , the best (unless the UE finally gets its shit together, but I doubt it).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)