The Living (31 page)
Authors: Anna Starobinets
She entered the Queendom in inviz and opened statistics.
2 000 156 users are currently waiting for queen in
luxury
come on queen!
…A hundred more than four hours ago.
When she
created
her Queendom, she had not expected there would be so many who wanted to join. That everyone would come running: men and women, entomologists and members of the Council… 5,000 friends, that’s what she had imagined at first, just to have a little distraction from
first-layer
problems. She hadn’t thought that her Queendom would grow so big, that it would become a fantasy for millions.
2 000 163 users are waiting for queen
where are you,
queen?
The Wise One nestled cosily on her knees, like a good lap-pet. He was dozing, smacking his lips funnily in his sleep. She carefully took his head from her knees and headed for the exit. Never in front of him.
mother_queen:
just a sec
As ever before the
act
, she felt sick with fear and disgust.
With fear that the Wise One would find out, that he would find out and not be able to forgive her, and he would yell at her using all those stupid words from the Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World: ‘faithful’, ‘cheating’…
And with disgust at herself, at what she had turned herself into, at what her millions of fans had turned her into: a huge, fat, clumsy, stupid, lustful…
mother_queen has updated her status:
available in isoptera
.
main menu
larva
worker
soldier
nymph
prince
Who
will
you
be?
Join in!
Isoptera is a never-ending act in luxury created by more than two million friends.
There was nothing – no up and no down, no thoughts and no body, no days and no nights. Absolute inviz. A thick, grey cocoon of peace. He was flying or floating, swaddled in blind nothingness. He had been lulled to sleep, he himself was nothing, just a part of inviz… And then, as always, a
something
stirred inside him traitorously and the emptiness
thickened
and started shaking, straining to expel this alien,
living
thing from itself…
His awakening was sudden and rough, like always after a BW sleep. Like he had been gobbled up and then spat in disgust out of a warm, soft mouth and into a buzzing beehive…
…There actually was something buzzing in first layer, dully and insistently. With difficulty the Wise One unglued his puffy eyes and sat up. No, not bees. Four fat bakugan beetles,
overflowing
with low-frequency buzzing, were ramming up against the Crystal, against a multi-coloured ad banner which was calling on him to love the Queen. The Wise One chased the beetles off the Crystal – heavy and glutted, they flew slowly off towards the wall; he squashed them and wiped their blood away with a cloth. Then he tried to close that damn banner, but instead it expanded to full screen. The Wise One cursed quietly. The Crystal would swallow all the ads that it found from
second layer and play them on the screen. As if deliberately to tease the Wise One, offering him the chance to admire out of the corner of his eye what he could never have…
The Wise One went through into the bathroom, washed his face with cold water and treated the little wounds from the bakugans with disinfectant so they wouldn’t go septic. Then he looked into the bedroom: Cleo was sitting on the floor, grasping her knees in her hands, doubled over, groaning quietly.
‘Are you not feeling well?’ he asked her, knowing that she wouldn’t answer.
She didn’t answer.
She rarely answered him when her face looked like that.
He sat down next to her and carefully stroked her eyebrows, which she had drawn towards the bridge of her nose in an expression of pain. Cleo started breathing noisily and collapsed against him, banging her face against his temple as if she were blind. He took her face in his hands and licked her on the lips, and she did not push him away.
She only let him kiss her on the lips when her face looked like
that
…
The screeching sound of a shrieking baby carried up from down below in the Available Garden. Cleo shuddered and wrenched herself free from the Wise One’s embrace with disgust and lay on her stomach.
The shrieking broke into a raspy gurgling as if the baby was being tickled down there and was giggling inexpertly. For some reason Layla also started giggling with him, as if she were being tickled too. Bagheera started droning out a lullaby,
plangent
and out of tune… Never any peace. Why was that stupid woman always caterwauling outside our window…?
The Wise One went downstairs in irritation.
There, in the garden, Bagheera wasn’t singing at all. She was whimpering, sitting on the ground and rocking her Darling in her arms. The Darling was grunting and choking on silent
coughs, sticking out its bluish tongue; it had available spots on its neck…
But Layla really was roaring with laughter, wriggling in the arms of a guard. Second stood a little to one side with a pale, twisted face.
‘Wise O-o-o-one,’ Layla drawled through her laughter when she saw Zero. ‘Make me your wife, Wise One, I’ll give you a Darling! Wise One, don’t think badly of me, I love kids! It’s just this little toad I don’t like, but I love all the others! Make me your wife, won’t you? And I’ll tell you everything! I know lots of things, Wise One, I even know about Malfunction number two! I even know that the Living’s done for! And that your System is a fake and that they’ve been lying to you for ages!’
Second strode towards Layla and hit her in the face. She fell silent for a second, then started roaring with laughter again, her whole body shaking and her eyes goggling crazily.
‘…They’re lying, they’re lying! And anyone who doesn’t lie, my husband cuts open their head, right here.’ Layla poked her forehead. ‘Skin and bones, he cuts it all open and pulls out their memory and turns them into trolls!’
The guard dragged her away.
‘…So will you take me as your wife, Wise One, when I become a troll? Because you’re a troll too, Wise One – you’ll be a troll and I’ll be a troll and our kids will be trolls!’
Open Letter to the Council of Eight
23rd July 472 A.V.
Dear Members of the Council! My eternal name is Healer 12, I’m an ordinary, run of the mill doctor and I work in an ordinary, run of the mill Centre for Population Control in region EA 8. I decided that I should write to you, and all other interested parts of the Living, here, in
socio
, in open mode, because I have recently been having more and more doubts about whether the wise Council is aware of the unlawful acts currently being carried out in ordinary, run of the mill centres like mine by SPO officers hiding behind the ‘law’.
Do you know that, on the orders of those whose mission is supposed to be to defend the peace and security of the Living, on their orders dozens of unregistered pregnancy termination operations are being carried out every day, primarily on women in the early stages of pregnancy? That medical staff – ordinary, run-of-the-mill doctors like me and my friends – are being forced to carry out secret ‘micro abortions’ on women who have recently conceived – telling them that it was an ectopic
pregnancy
or that there was no pregnancy at all, and that the blood loss that’s just taken place right there in the examination chair was caused by inflammation? Did you know that the ‘
conditions
of secrecy’ that have been imposed on us for carrying out these procedures in combination with the unplanned nature and urgency of the operations (instruction no. 2, as it is called, always comes unexpectedly) precludes the presence of assistants at the operation and forces us to work in premises that are not fitted with reanimation equipment? And that very often these operations lead not only to temporary cessation of existence for the foetus, but also to the temporary cessation or incapacitation of the would-be mother as a result of blood loss…
There is blood, blood on my hands and I will not keep silent about it! I have been a doctor for nine reproductions and I have, following the commands of the Servant of Order, stained my clean incode with the blood of innocents. After interrupting each existence, I clean up my office when I’m done and I wipe away the blood, but still it clings to my criminal hands. And when I leave my office and run into my colleagues in the
corridor
, I can tell by their faces, by the way they can’t look me in the eye and hide their hands behind their back, I can tell that they’re doing the same thing as me… Blood, blood on our hands. And we want to know what this ‘law’ is that forces us to spill the Living’s blood.
That is all, my friends. At last I’ve done it. I’ve overcome my cowardice and written openly to the Council in Living Journal. I have confessed, and now you may judge me…
Dear members of the Council, judge me! As a doctor who has broken the rule of ‘do no harm’ or as a coward who has kept quiet too long, or even as a member of a criminal
conspiracy
, but do not judge me as a Dissident, in relation to the Defamation of Order act, because I have told you the absolute truth.
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users’ comments.
spiderman:
healer is a hero hooray
evelina_33:
in april 471 i went to the district centre for control of the population. during my regular
check-up
the doctor announced that i had an ‘inflammation of the womb’, the ordinary regular check-up had somehow caused a haemorrhage. thanks, healer. now i know what really happened to me!!
milk-cap:
what a load of nonsense, why would the planetmen destroy embryos. healer’s a psycho
mongrel:
+1 gopz
santa:
healer is right, and it’s actually a lot worse than he said.
sister_66:
+100, what the planetmen are doing is an outrage. and it’s not just embryos, go on orderisover. net, people there are talking about their pauses and their friends’ pauses which have happened in the middle of the day without a trial or investigation
healer:
thank you to everyone who replied: thanks to you guys i unexpectedly became a
hundred-thousander
, and that’s a great honour and a great responsibility. my friends! i don’t think of myself as a hero. i just said what someone had to say sooner or later.
second:
Dear Healer, Thank you for your open letter and your timely alarm signal. The Council of Eight promises to carry out a very thorough inquiry in your centre, and also provide you with personal security for the duration of the inquiry.
healer:
thanks
view whole thread (45 789 comments)?
healer:
update: today I got an official invitation to go to the Residence (!)
healer:
update: I chatted to the Second member of the Council and to the Wise One. Amazing, considerate people who are devoted to the Living! They took what I had to say very seriously and made copies of all the Instruction No. 2’s which I had kept especially for the investigation. I have no doubt: with people like that in power the SPO-ers’ outrage will be stopped very soon.
healer:
update: friends, I would like to share with you all the findings of the inquiry. I am happy to report that no violations or abuses of power were discovered in the work of the SPO. The investigation revealed that the Instruction No. 2’s which staff at our Centre for Population Control were receiving on the official channel, seemingly from Order Service officers, did not actually originate with the Order Service. The Instruction No. 2’s were the product of a harmful virus which had been released into our Centre’s internal network. The creator of the virus, the dissident Gnome, and also our system administrator, who failed to trace the attack, have today been punished with correction.
I would like to express my sincerest apologies to the Service for Planetary Order for the unintentional defamation contained in my Open Letter.
I would like to thank the Council of Eight for their swift and timely response to my alarm signal.
spiderman:
healer is a bloody stooge
santa:
+1000. i’m deleting healer from my friend list
view whole thread (487 276 comments)?
The Wise One opened the whole thread and lazily scanned the final comments at the tail end of the discussion. There was nothing of interest – just the latest serving of nonsensical junk from Dissidents who stubbornly refused to believe in
something
that was plain for all to see.
For a while Healer’s LJ had been a treasure house of
interesting
and unusual dissident types, ‘slanderers of order’, who looked fantastic on the show – real rebels. The episodes of Who Still Does Not Agree with Spiderman and Santa got the highest ratings in the history of the show, as did the broadcast of their Shameful Pauses…
Now it had all got so boring and predictable, no more breaths of fresh air. Once every few days another post would appear from someone who thought that Healer was right to agree and there would be another slack wave of indignation from a few dissidents. Something about ‘manipulation of facts’, ‘bribing the author’, a couple of links to
orderisover.net.
The comments hadn’t contained anything like the normal fully fledged dissidence for a long time now, and any attempts that the Wise One made to use ‘slanderers’ on the show usually ended in a fiasco: the slanderers would mumble something with a haunted look in their eye, immediately admit that they were guilty of everything, hurriedly delete their comments, repent blankly and promise to get corrected. Basically, there was no confrontation, no conflict…
But really, of course, he mustn’t grumble. The wave of
dissidence
and mistrust of the SPO and the Council that had been produced by Healer’s Open Letter had presented a pretty serious threat. And, glap, Second hadn’t executed Healer in the heat of the moment (he had been planning on it at first, but the Wise One talked him out of it!), and they had got to the bottom of the problem properly and punished the guilty parties. If they had executed Healer then they would’ve ended up with a hundred-thousander martyr on their hands. And
now they had a hundred-thousander friend. But friends are no good for the show… but then again, why not?!
‘So I’ll get him on too,’ the Wise One realised with relief. ‘Healer. He spoke well, I remember… And his face was so open and honest… A good face. I’ll talk to him all theoretically, about slanderers of order, about dissidence as a phenomenon, and about his own story… And at the end of the show: an amnesty for all the “slanderers” who officially admit on Healer’s page that they were wrong and that they made a mistake… The ratings are going to be just unbelievable…’
‘Presenter to assistant,’ he tapped on the keyboard. ‘Invite user Healer to see me in the Residence immediately. Dress code “feeling lucky”: we’re going to film him for the show.’
