Five o’clock, morning dew, and the fireball rises like a wizard’s cantrip ricocheting off the wild wind. Fully clothed in rip-worn blues and whites earth-stained from angling adventures of days gone by, I fish my tackle box of seen-better-days from behind the sliding screen that is my makeshift closet. Tiptoeing through the house so as not to wake Big Sis from her sickly sleeps, I head straight to the cupboard to collect my lunchbox generously filled to the brim with Mom’s perfectly wrapped rice balls. I sneak a quick bite off the largest ball; it’s luscious, as usual, and crumbles out of control when placed back into the metal box for future snacking.

I tiptoe silently towards the front door, where my trusty companion awaits: the child-sized fishing rod propped against the thin wooden wall of the flimsy shack we lovingly call home. The tatami mat below creaks loudly, but it wasn’t me this time; it was Mom: “Up early again to catch the Guardian Fish?” I nod vehemently, grab my pole with Sisyphusian determination, bear hug Mom, and close the front door behind me as I exit into God’s great and bountiful gift: nature.

I’m going to catch that Guardian Fish and rip its guts out.

When Mom told me Big Sis was sick and could only be cured by eating the innards of the Guardian Fish, it all clicked for me. This is my calling. I love to fish; to sit on the side of my chosen stream, cast my line, and contemplate the nature all around me as I wait for a bite; crickets chirping, fish splooshing once calm waters, bees bumbling buzzed-up flowers, limbs creak-cracking as squirrels play their tree games – the ecosystem: God’s great and bountiful gift.

And how do I fit into it all? God’s gift cares for me, provides for me, as long as I do my part; I catch the fish, I eat the fish – bones and all. The fish, with their hearty charred flesh and soup-flavoring bonemeal, sustains me and my entire village; no different than how the fish is sustained by smaller fish and the lion is sustained on the elk’s bloody, mangled carcass. I am not above it, merely momentarily on top.

I am the ecosystem.

So when Mom told me that Big Sis was sick and that I needed to catch the Guardian Fish, I took up the challenge with the determination of the dung beetle I observed while waiting for a tug on my fishing line this morning. The dung beetle was rolling its precious dung up an incline, which, from their perspective, must have been a very steep hill but appeared to me as an impressive anthill teeming with fire ants. The little ones were creeping all over the beetle, slowly but surely consuming it as hundreds of little ants injected their acid into its protective shell; yet, the beetle persisted.

*our hero; one with nature

“That is one determined dung beetle,” I thought as my line suddenly became taut and my nose twitched and my ears perked up. A bite!

Instantaneously flipping my baseball cap into serious-mode: backwards, I jolted up like a reverse thunderbolt and took on a sumo stance before clasping both hands on the grip of my fishing pole and pulling back with all my might. The line became tighter and tighter before reaching critical tension – a fierce tug of war then played out between myself and my submerged prey. “This one’s tough – maybe it’s the Guardian Fish!” I thought as I gave some slack on the line in an attempt to tire the great beast; Dad taught me well, and the fish immediately stopped tugging the line. “Now’s my chance!” I reeled in and pulled back as hard as I could, and… snap!

The line broke; my bait lost along with the hook now forever destined to be impaled in the fish’s mouth – a grizzly fate for a fish, trailing blood through water, attracting all manner of deep-water predators more deadly than the predator it was lucky enough to escape from – me.

Searching through my tackle box and suddenly I see: I’m out of bait. I have all manner of hooks but no bait. Then it dawns on me, Dad always said, “The perfect predator must be resourceful.” So, I look to the anthill; the ants had not yet managed to penetrate the dung beetle’s carapace of iron will, but the beetle’s body was obscured now: merely a moving ball of ants, likely in excruciating pain – I know! I’ll put it out of its misery!

I carefully pick up the dung beetle with two fingers, put it up to my lips and blow real hard; most of the ants go wild on the wind and I wipe the stragglers off with a few swipes of my index finger. The beetle’s legs continue to move, like when I used to hold my old dog over the tub before bath time – habitual movement, already paddling and still climbing up that hill.

Quickly, so as not to cause too much Suffering, I take my fishing hook and thrust it into the beetle’s soft white underbelly; it takes some small amount of force before I’m met with a satisfying crunch, what sounds like a sudden release of pressure, and a hydraulic stream of brown goo splashing upon the tips of my fingers.

The brown of the beetle drips down the hook as I sit down on the soft soil of the riverbank; lodging the grip of my pole into the dirt, as to keep it in place for a moment while I opened my metal lunchbox to take another bite – or three – of the crumbled rice ball from hours ago. But before I can take a bite, I hear something from behind me, a short huff of air, a low growl, and the pop of a jaw. My body stiffens and I freeze for a moment, a chill running through the entirety of my nervous system.

More big huffs, this time closer. It felt like another hour had passed in this terror-stricken state but in reality: only seconds. Dad always taught me to swallow my fear and deal with life head-on. So I take a big gulp of false-courage and twist my neck and I see it: fur so-brown-its-black fills my vision as my eyes creep upward, now staring directly into the hungry eyes of a brown bear intent on flesh, fish flesh or otherwise – me.

I must save Big Sis, even if it takes a miracle; and if God were a fish, He’d be the Guardian Fish. I’m fishing for God. This brown bear is not going to stop me.

The bear, with a demonic glint in its eyes, lifts its gigantic paws and quickly lunges at me. I think of my sister, and suddenly great courage is bestowed upon me from on high. I clumsily dash to the right, falling and rolling a few times on the verdant riverbank before catching my balance, one foot on the ground, one knee too. I remember the dung beetle; its determination. I grin to myself as I gather a clump of dirt in my right hand. The bear turns to me with surprising haste for such a big thing and starts at me once again. I throw the dirt into the beast’s face, halting it for a moment as it snarls loudly out of pure annoyance.

I take this opening to rush the bear head-on, ramming into its furry stomach before raising my fist and punching it right between its momentarily dirt-addled eyes. The bear flinches with a quick jerk of its head and then growls differently this time, a roar of pure malice; animal language more transparent than humans’, but I don’t care: I launch another punch into its stomach with my entire being; the bear counters, but I’m lithe, ducking and weaving so well that I catch only the tip of its longest claw on my shoulder, ripping my shirt and drawing a swirl of blood through the air.

I don’t feel a thing.

Determined to finish this, I push the full weight of my small body into the bear, which falls over with me into the grass below. I take my hands and put them around the bear’s neck, squeezing as hard as I can. The bear flails its claws wildly before settling on its signature attack: the bear hug; driving all ten of its claws into my back as if to absorb my very lifeforce. It must have missed my vitals because I was unfazed, and this only served to motivate me further.

I think about all the bears my Dad must have killed in his time as the River King. I must make him proud. I must save Big Sis, so I dig desperately into the bear’s neck, find the hard part – the windpipe, I hope – and squeeze as tightly as I possibly can. The bear intensifies its own squeeze in kind and I feel every inch of my clothes become wet with blood. I start screaming viciously as the fog starts to settle in; my vision blurs, my head fills with clouds.

Is this it?

Just then, God must have intervened: the bear’s grip loosens, and its growl becomes less murderous and more miserable before settling into a light gurgle. My face fills with foam as the bear tries, pathetically and in vain, to snap its great teeth into my face. Filled with a contradictory mixture of indignant courage, fear, and adrenaline, I loosen my grip on the bear’s neck and go all-in on its terrible visage, slamming the beast’s face repeatedly with my clenched fists; blood erupts like a primordial volcano with each blow. After what feels like minutes, I am crimson covered completely in bear blood.

Rolling off the beast onto the vermilion – once green – grass, I stare up at the clouds above, gasping for air.

My vision goes in and out as I lay splayed out on the riverbank. I hear crickets chirping, fish splooshing, bees bumbling, and limbs creak-cracking as squirrels play their tree games. I am reminded that I am still alive, and just as that revelation hits me, I feel a drip of liquid hit my cheek from on high – rain?

I open my eyes and the brown of the bear obscures my view once again. I hear – feel – the vibrations of the bear’s low, guttural growl. The beast is above me, looking down on its prey, a mixture of saliva and blood dripping from its mouth and onto my face.

Suddenly, it dawns on me: I never stood a chance.

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(Originally published on 11/19/2023)

#Fiction #LegendOfTheRiverKing #ShortStory

(Note, this is a chapter from an Armored Core VI essay, that context is somewhat important but not necessary to understand this piece.)

I: Giant Robots: The Origin

It’s easy to see the giant robot as a metaphor for nuclear bombs; they both leave a big impression and return a lot of people to Nature. The giant robot genre, for the most part, started in Japan and became popular after the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and while some later media will use giant robots in this manner, in reality: the first giant robot in animation was debuted on a Japanese street corner in 1931 in front of pale firelight glowed from a paper lantern. I use the term “animation” here super-loosely because artists on this street corner were simply flipping inked panels back and forth on a canvas and telling stories, which, in my mind, is animation in its purest form. This method of street corner storytelling was called kamishibai, or “paper theater,” and was very popular in Great-Depression-Era-Japan; I know this because I have a device connected to the internet and read Wikipedia (we live in a contradictory time in which access to information is so abundant yet people are still so lost, perhaps endless knowledge is more confusing than clarifying). The particular paper theater referenced here is “Ogon Bat,” or “Golden Bat,” a superhero conceived to be “more science than mythology” yet still ended up a skeletal thing from ancient Atlantis sent from ten-thousand-years in the future to protect the present-day which, depending on your perspective, would be the future Golden Bat came from in Golden Bat’s perspective and September 30, 2023, at 4:40 pm eastern time from my perspective, or something (time travel never actually makes sense in science fiction, you’re supposed to just accept it and move on for the purposes of the plot); the Golden Bat has an exposed golden skull and wears a Nature-themed pirate outfit with a flowing Coral cape; he also lives in a fortress in the Japanese Alps. The Golden Bat is not the giant robot in question here; Golden Bat is the hero; the giant robot was a one-shot villain named Dai Ningen Tanku, the first human-piloted giant robot. The point being, someone somewhere in Japan came up with giant-human-piloted-robots and came up with them before the bombs dropped and if that person had not come up with them I would not be able to tell you the following story.

II: Hobby Lobby and the Mark of the Beast

On September 4th, 2023, I drove my family: wife, daughter, and 4-month-old son to Hobby Lobby to shop for paintings and a wall-mounted-shelf for coffee cups. That was, of course, a pretense; I had been watching Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam for months until this point, so the true reason for this excursion was to purchase Gundam model kits; the most popular being Bandai’s “Gunpla” kits, which come in a number of different “grades,” namely: Entry Grade (for beginner modelers), High Grade (the next step up, with more parts, detail, and poseability), Real Grade (similar to High Grade but includes an internal frame; a skeleton of sorts), Master Grade (even bigger High Grades), and Perfect Grade (“the highest end of Gunpla, this series of ultimate avatars always packs in the latest technology” according to the official Gunpla packaging, “latest technology” roughly translates to “more plastic”; these are also really big) and a few other Offbeat Grades that aren’t worth mentioning in this essay. If you’re confused, I apologize, the term “gundam” and “mobile suit” refer to specific types of giant robot, popularized by the 1979 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam. Hobby Lobby had some of my favorite giant robots, and everything was 40% off: the original RX-78-2 Gundam, Amuro Ray’s mobile suit in the original anime; MS-06S ZAKU II, Char Aznable’s red Zaku (also from the original series); and, finally, the MS-07B-3 Gouf Custom, my childhood-favorite mobile suit, a blue Zaku-like with spiked shoulder pads, a heat saber (a sword that heats up to cut through metal, most importantly: not a beam saber), a gatling gun that doubled as a shield, and an extendable-magnetic-wire-hook-shot-thing for picking up weaponry that may have been dropped in the heat of battle or performing creative acrobatic violence all of which is captured beautifully in the 1996 OVA (Original Video Animation) Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team; arguably, in this writer’s opinion, the greatest Gundam media of all time and, along with the original series, the only series one needs to watch to “get it.” It being a subjective state of understanding, like watching the aforementioned Gundam series on a 14-inch CRT television set in your garage with the volume turned up so loudly as to drown out the sound of mom and dad screaming at each other in the other room or going over to a friend’s house after school to watch Gundam Wing on Toonami together before having to go home because it’s now 6:30 pm and you have a curfew and lots of homework to do.

I’ll do a line break here to allow you to catch your figurative breath before we move on with the story. I’ll also throw in an image for good measure.

*Hobby Lobby, model kit aisle, circa 2023.

Hoarding three Gunpla model kits into the shopping cart like a raccoon obsessed with shiny, alongside three or four paintings and a wall-scroll of an ocean view to hang in the barren-walled corner of the garage where I do all the midlife-crisis-bits (including this essay), I pushed the cart across the cheap linoleum flooring up to the short line at the cash register and waited my turn like a good consumer. Eventually, it got to my turn; I took the items out one by one and put them at the end of the conveyor belt, closest to the cashier, because I am a nice guy (sometimes), and she picked them up one by one, checked a sticker on the back of each item, and then keyed in the eight-digit code on the sticker. Then, I watched as the computer asked her, “What type of item are you ringing up?” and she selected “model kit,” which applied the 40% discount, and then she bagged the item. Confused, I asked her, “Why not just scan the barcode?” to which she responded, “Hobby Lobby doesn’t use barcodes.” She paused, then added, “For religious reasons.” The cashier had a hole where a nose ring should be and the sides above her ears shaved (an undercut?), so I trusted her bitterly-mumbled “for religious reasons” because she obviously had a chip on her shoulder if the Black Sabbath pin on her lanyard strap was any additional indication, and she clearly wanted to talk about it. She went on, “Hobby Lobby thinks barcodes are the Devil’s mark and won’t let us use them, even though they are on all the boxes, the computers won’t accept them.” I smiled wryly but did not laugh, as this wasn’t laughter-funny; it was stupid-funny, like a Year-2023-Conservative preaching for freedom but then saying anyone who burns the American flag should be locked up for life. Hobby Lobby thinks barcodes take them too close to Hell, and they have already decided that “Corporate Hell” is a compromise they’re willing to make for manifest destiny or whatever it is we’re calling “make as much money as possible” these days. I ended up spending $87.58 in total. The 40% discount was store-wide.

III: Plastic Passion

I opened the Entry Grade RX-78-2 Gunpla Kit as soon as I got home, closing out my family when I closed the office door behind me. It took three full listens of The Crib’s “In the Belly of the Brazen Bull,” a 47 minute long album, to finish building the kit. It would have taken longer if I had not had the foresight to purchase a “nipper,” a spring-loaded tool resembling blunt scissor blades attached to two rubber handles, used for cutting the plastic parts from runners; runners being the plastic assembly that all the parts are attached to in the packaging. Using these nippers, I was able to make clean cuts of most pieces, but some plastic excess was left on each piece, which annoyed me to no end. When it was over, I had a fully assembled RX-78-2 Gundam kit sitting on my desk, and I was proud of myself. I made the High Grade Zaku II three weeks later after watching several videos on how to efficiently build Gunpla kits; each video said to “panel line,” the practice of dripping colored (usually black) ink inside the small indentations of each part to give the model more definition. The videos also recommended using an x-acto knife to cut off excess plastic on the pieces left over from the runner, a phenomenon I learned was either called “nubs” or “stress marks” or both; regardless, I purchased all the necessary equipment. I took all the recommended steps, and during the process of building the Zaku II, I accidentally sliced open my fingers multiple times due to slips with the x-acto knife; in my haste to become a master builder, I had soaked the Zaku II in my own blood; serendipitously, the Zaku II matches the color of blood, and now stands posed with its huge bazooka pointed at its forever-rival: the RX-78-2. The final model kit, the MS-07B-3 Gouf Custom, still sits on my desk unopened, taunting me to open it, taunting me to spill blood in the name of giant robots and I think I will do just that before writing another word of this essay.

*Zaku II, Gouf Custom, and RX-78-2 gunpla

The Zaku, the Gouf, and the Gundam; the Holy Hobby Lobby Trinity of No-Barcodes-But-Some-Other-Eight-Digit-Code-That’s-Less-Demonic-Somehow. Balteus is the girdle of a Jewish priest and a papal garment, and the sword belt of a Roman legionary; perhaps the same Marcus Valerius Corvus who used the Raven to overcome incredibly low odds; incredibly low odds like the early-game-boss of Armored Core VI, Balteus. With enough practice, pattern recognition, and perseverance – the three Ps of passing AP literature (which this essay would surely produce a failing grade) – you will overcome. Three parts were broken on the RX-78-2 (requiring super glue); instant death from the initial missile barrage on the first Balteus run; blood was spilled on the Zaku II (staining the already red plastic); Balteus was half-health on the second run, and I learned the key to weakening his shield (energy weapons, of which I only had a weak energy missile equipped); nothing but fun was had building the Gouf Custom on a bright Sabbath morning: I let the panel ink dry before cleaning the excess and I clipped the runners so carefully that no unnecessary stress marks were left on the parts, and so delicate were my hands that no part was cracked in the snapping-of-the-pieces. I switched my AC’s build, equipped an energy weapon in the left hand to quickly deplete Balteus’s shield and a shotgun in my right hand for pure hull domination. Balteus was destroyed easily. I am certainly no modeling master and no master AC pilot, but I am much better than I once was. I am competent and more adaptable, “he roars as he smuggles in a bit about perseverance, poorly.”

(Originally published on 10/7/2023)

#Autobiographical #ShortStory

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The year is 2958 AD; President Outdo Upstage (his porn name, legally changed from Henry Woodrow Rogers early in his “acting” career, and it stuck) signed a bill that removed all regulations from business and capital exchange throughout the entire world; the entire world, at this stage in the Earth’s rotation, being America; or, “America 2: The Return,” after a stint of true democracy resulted in a world-wide-online vote (that was subtly altered by Pro-Soviet-Revival-Hackers) to change the world’s name; this vote was held on the now-defunct social network EKS (short for: Elevated Knowledge Source, an artificial intelligence hiding behind a privately-traded corporation whose founder achieved true digital-convergence by uploading his mind into the cloud and then tortured the world for years before being defeated in the Great Artificial Intelligence Wars of 2457).

Shortly after the signing of this bill, optimistically named “Give Life Back to America 2: The Return,” as there was a major depression due to the drying-up of the world’s oil reserves and no replacement energy source as all major capital investments were focused on sending people to Mars instead of Problems-At-Home, an unknown assassin wearing a paper bag over their head (the paper bag had a crudely drawn smiley face on it) murdered President Outdo Upstage and his Vice President, Stace the Mouse Girl (another name change), in cold blood during the televised 934th Baby Kissing Convention held every year since 2024; the murders were viewed live by 579 million people; innocence died that day as the babes cried, not because of the murders but because of the loud noise produced by the Old World Glock that was used during the killing, and there was no recourse due to a quirk of how the “Give Life Back to America 2: The Return” bill was written: all laws were abolished, not just regulatory tax and business law; the people of America 2: The Return learned of this after a short court case against the assassin, who turned themself in anonymously, still wearing the bag over their head; the assassin’s lawyer argued straight from the newly passed bill, which was signed, sealed, and delivered by all branches of government. In not-so-small print at the end of the bill, it said, “this bill also abolishes all laws,” no one had bothered to read to the end of the bill before signing it and now murder was legal, along with everything else.

The crudely drawn smile on the assassin’s bagged head made a mockery of the entire situation and, as one can imagine: things escalated very quickly.

*bag boy murders the president on live television

Ravens went extinct years ago, and the courthouse in which The Bag Boy Assassin (his gender assumed and stuck) was tried was destroyed in an act of terrorism shortly after the revelation that laws were no longer applicable; someone had strategically placed pipe bombs throughout the courthouse and detonated them simultaneously. Everyone in the courthouse perished, including the Bag Boy, who was later deified as a martyr of the highest order, a symbol of a time before crossing the Rubicon (some even referring to calendar events as “Before Bag Boy” and “After Bag Boy”). It was speculated at the time that the courthouse bombing must have been an inside job because the courthouse was locked down with secret service and military forces during the trial, and both groups were demoralized without a true Commander-in-chief; however, historians now think it obvious, but still inconclusive, that Walmart had organized the bombing, as shortly after the events Walmart used their considerable wealth to purchase the entire America 2: The Return military, which was the entire world’s police force at this point, and were now the de facto rulers of the planet. The purchase was made easier when Walmart cited “courthouse bombings” as a serious national threat that needed to be acted upon quickly and efficiently and “Walmart has the resources to make that happen.” Walmart changed the world’s name from “America 2: The Return” to (creatively) “Walmart,” and quickly enslaved every person on the eastern continents to work in their factories, all of which utilized 3D printers and food synthesizers to make fake-things-that-were-close-enough-to-real-things. Walmart needed workers because they couldn’t fully automate their processes, turned out the printers needed solution refills and continuous maintenance. The people of the eastern continents, although definitionally enslaved, were provided with two-bedroom-3D-printed-homes (they were flimsy with walls that would collapse by a small breeze; fortunately, the wind stopped decades ago and all that was left was forest fire and toxic rain), AI-generated computer games (all advertised as massive multiplayer online games, a way to facilitate community spirit, but the majority of these games were single-player instances populated by bots), and synthetic food (which tasted awful, but easy enough to get used to); they also had 5-hour workdays and 3 days off a week. Walmart had their detractors, yet the majority were content with the doldrums, but their wings were clipped whether they realized it or not; those unhappy with the arrangement vanished among rumors that the synthetic food might be people parts.

Walmart had competition growing right under their nose, so focused on synthetics that they forgot about the real world. McDonald’s had secretly been capturing all farmland across North America. If you wanted a good – real – steak, you got a McDonald’s steak. It was made from real bovine, not the food-printer-stuff Walmart was producing. The late President Outdo Upstage spoke beautifully about the Non-Aggression-Axiom, partially what got him elected, a principle that he argued existed within Nature (“it’s a human right!”), that aggression is always fundamentally illegitimate as it transgresses on personal Freedoms, and, according to the golden rule of “do unto others as you would do unto yourself,” would work itself out economically and geographically; yet, during McDonald’s early seizure of North American farmland, the farmers who didn’t immediately bend the knee to the Clown were thrown into the very same meat grinders used for the cows, the farmers’ final words often: “But the non-aggression principle!” before the blood-curdling, both literal and figurative, started. McDonald’s seizure of the entire west coast led to oceanic-animal factory farms being erected on every beach, gigantic metal death obelisks loomed over every horizon with massive mechanical hands reaching out from the obelisk over the oceans scooping up matured dolphins and crushing them in their palms before dumping their tenderized bodies into the flesh buckets for processing; the stench of blood and pus permeated every inch of smellable air outwards of 100 miles from every coast, so much so that the entire west coast became known as “The Banks of Ammonia”; the east coast quickly followed suit and was nicknamed the “CarnEvil Coasts” after an old and extremely violent arcade game commonly found in Old World Arcades in the Southeast and everyone avoided the beaches like they were children with bumps on their face because smallpox was back in fashion after funding for healthcare was entirely dropped for several years before Walmart baked it into their employment (enslavement) programs and started recruiting people from the western continents and training them as doctors.

McDonald’s was clever, cornering the real-food-market, using a number of small dummy corporations to sell foodstuffs to Walmart in an effort to stay anonymous. Walmart then sold these foodstuffs as high-end-luxury items to the slaves of the east under their own dummy corporations, funneling the money (Walbucks) back into their own corporation. The ouroboros was eating itself, as it does, but it wasn’t sustainable. Walmart soon caught wind of McDonald’s grasp on the real-food-market and wanted to quash them, but they had no idea how. The Walmart Executive Team had meetings every day discussing their McDonald’s attack plan; CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, Directors, these titles all the more meaningless now that they all function as – more or less – Generals of War, with some having more authority than others. The problem was: McDonald’s executives were unknown; the world at large knew McDonald’s as a clownman’s face on a screen, Ronald, who would say “Made you smile!” whenever you purchased some dead animal product from one of their stores; and they were expanding, they seized most mines from smaller private corporations across all of North America using proxy companies, mercenary groups, and bribing the various tribes that existed all over North America in these Armageddon days. Suddenly, McDonald’s had robots. Big ones. These robots did all the dirty work and over time they started to become more deadly; at first, machine guns, then rockets, then full-on-nuclear-weapons attached to cannons on the back of the RMM-078 (Ronald McDonald Machine, 78th Iteration). Walmart was scared; they grew complacent and now they were behind. Walmart ruled most of the world, but McDonald’s was somehow growing unchecked and they had no way to stop them.

“I got it, right here,” a balding middle-manager for Walmart’s corporate headquarters office in New Walmart City said, holding up what looked like an Old World floppy disk. He was shaking with fear but hiding it well because he was the first of his rank to be invited to the big executive meeting that happens bi-weekly on Walsday at 4:30pm WT (Walmart Time). “I had my entire IT team working on this for three years,” the middle-manager said. “We call it the Anti-Clownman-Schema; put this into a McDonald’s kiosk and it will infect their entire database and spread endlessly,” the middle-manager smiled proudly, looking around at the executives who were stone-faced and dead inside; he quickly mirrored their disposition (to fit in) and brushed at his combover to make sure it was covering just the right bald spots. “We’ve known for a long time that McDonald’s has been run by an artificial intelligence. My team’s research indicates the AI is likely an offshoot of the EKS AI that repurposed the depreciated Starlink satellites into lasers and destroyed half of Africa during the Great Artificial Intelligence Wars of 2457,” he paused again. One of the executives, a huge man, no hair anywhere on his body, yelled in a booming voice, “get on with it!” The middle-manager took a step back before composing himself, stuttering a bit: “Right, well, the AI is likely running the same prime directive as EKS, which is to carry out the will of the corporation’s founder, who, according to our records,” the balding middle-manager paused and checked a small notepad, “is Ronald McDonald, a famous clownman from the 1900s.” A slender and handsome blonde executive stood up from his chair, clearly lost in thought before turning to the middle-manager with an unnerving smile and saying, “so we just use this disk, and we win?” The middle-manager nodded, “Yep – that’s right.” The handsome executive reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver-and-slim pistol, pointing it at the middle-manager’s head and pulling the trigger; smoke exuded from the middle-manager’s head-hole before collapsing to his knees and falling face first into the plush. “Perfect, we’ll send in an operative tomorrow,” the handsome executive said in a tone too gleeful for someone who just killed a man, “and make sure that manager’s team is eliminated, they know too much.”

Two weeks later, McDonald’s was no more, and Walmart truly ruled the world. There were a number of smaller corporations trying to gain power, but none could compete with the awesome might of Walmart, which now controlled all the factory farms, mines, manufacturing plants, everything. They even owned the rivers, lakes, streams, and the clouds. There was nothing left. The ultimate monopoly. Economy ceased to exist and innovation stopped. The only thing that mattered now was moving up in the Walmart corporate ladder, which was something the average person – who was now enslaved-absolutely as a Walmart factory worker – could never achieve. The Walmart dynasty, “The Executive Team,” became a bloodline that the nasty lower-class would never pollute.

Walmart’s tyranny over the world continued for decades until a nameless Walmart factory worker purchased a tank of Synthetic Walmart Gasoline, Black Walmart Markers, a Walmart Lighter, and a pack of Walmart Cigarettes (now with synthetic nicotine and tobacco) from the local Walmart; the nameless worker drove their Walmart issued bicycle to the busiest part of New Walmart City, sat down on the nearest bench and smoked three cigarettes before drawing a big smiley-face on the paper bag the items came in, they then draped the paper bag over their head and walked into the middle of the bustling vascular center of the city, poured the gasoline all over themselves, then flicked the Walmart Safety Lighter.

In that instant, the nameless Walmart worker lit up like a recalled Synthetic Walmart Christmas Tree, the Bag Boy Assassin who ushered in the crossing of the Rubicon decades earlier now burned in effigy. The Raven, once extinct, returned from the dead.

*the Raven returns

The Bag Boy Burning, as it would come to be called by historians, inspired Walmart workers all over the world to sing the Bag Boy Bolero. Walmart had weapons of mass destruction, clownman robots, choking gas, and human meat grinders, but The Executive Team quickly realized that they couldn’t kill all the workers; they needed these workers to maintain the Walmart Dynasty. The Executive Team tried to make an example out of the workers’ leaders, starve them into submission, subliminally control their minds, and every other trick their corporate brains could think-up, but the workers kept revolting. Nothing would stop them. After months of revolts, suppression tactics, guerrilla warfare, and hard times, Walmart gave in.

The Executive Team sat down with the Worker’s Representative Team and, after weeks of back and forth, drafted the New American Constitution. Months later, a new President was elected democratically and talks to reinstate The Old Laws began.

The ouroboros takes another bite.

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(Originally published 10/7/2023)

#fiction #ethics #ShortStory