Someone threw a brick / hucked fired clay at pigs for us.
GERGUS QUIRKED her head as she peered into the WRENS branded box between the two trees at the entrance to her cave/tunnel. She ran a furry thumb over the little bird-and-letters logo and the words “Workers Reawaken Everyone Now.” She tore the box open and picked up a journal and pen inside.
She started to draw the people who had sent her the box. When she sketched the basic form of the time machine, the factory sharpened into view in her mind:
Originally appeared in the print edition of Locust #8. Splash image photograph by Richard Reilly of work by Tish Turl and Adam Turl.
“What have we put in the first box?” Gergus knew the red-haired man speaking was named Uylius.
Kora tipped her head from side to side. “Haven’t decided yet.”
Uylius nodded his understanding. He sighed as he shuffled through random items in his mind. “Candy!” He lit up as he imagined the probably universally positive reaction to suddenly finding a box of candy.
Kora seemed skeptical for a moment but quickly conceded. “Okay. I don’t know why not.”
Kora and Uylius rejoined a larger group of people around the time machine.
“Uylius says we should send candy.” Kora offered without much enthusiasm.
“People like candy,” Uylius declared. “So let’s go see if we can send back some WRENS boxes instead of sending more pencils to the Baby Murderer Memorial Museum. I can’t believe we get to hang that ‘thank you’ note up in the break room…”
Uylius shook his head to clear it and noticed the exhaustion of each of the nineteen other people standing around the time machine.
“Okay, you all go get some rest. I’ll send this one out and we’ll find out after a good night’s sleep.”
Kora boo’ed him before he’d even finished his sentence. The rest of the team quickly joined in, suddenly finding the enthusiasm they’d previously lacked.
Poiretta threw several handfuls of pick-n-mix candy and a variety of foil-wrapped, goody-filled chocolates from one of the fulfillment bins. She quickly taped the top, stamped her name on the side near the logo, and put it on the temporal pad of the time machine.
Uylius skimmed through the instruction booklet’s extensive troubleshooting guide and tinkered with a few dials on the work panel beneath the testing switch. He used a pencil to mark those changes out of the troubleshooting guide, crossed his fingers, and threw the switch.
Everyone ‘oohed’ when the box blipped out of existence.
Kora rushed to the computer terminal attached to the left side of the machine and punched in a tracking number handed to her by Poiretta.
“2023! It went backwards!” Kora exclaimed. “ Somebody call the CRC and tell them we sent back candy. We should try a book next! That’ll really shit it up back there.”
I HOPE one day I see revolt; end everyday’s decay. The many headed beast we must slay, inspire the rich to pray; we will be nourished by our wealthy prey.
I will resurrect everyone who is dead / as soon as I can lift my ass from bed / as soon as I feed the worms in my head
I settle in the rubble. / Lose the thread of hours and sleep. / What is lethal is of endless comfort. / When the ticker scrolls past: / 8792 new corpses; and those are just / the ones who put in applications.
I am told it goes back to my walker, / rushing to the TV screaming / “Boxcar Willie, Boxcar Willie!”
ADDIE UNCURLED her tardigrade body and opened her eyes. She yawned, still exhausted.
She registered, at once, the water wasn’t cold and packed with dissolved minerals. It was sterile, clean, and wrong.
And then it was cold again — as sudden as the realization of the cold’s prior absence.
Addie curled back into herself to sleep, but the new cold was more intense than any she’d felt before in her southern Illinois cave pool. She fought the panic with thoughts of kissing Lyla once she escaped the lab.
Then, the shaking started. Slow, gentle, but growing beyond her control — just like the cold. The vibrations became a supersonic thrum, rattling Addie against the walls of her cage. Their intensity peaked and suddenly Addie was moving through the ice as if it didn’t exist.
“What…?” The booming voice of the scientist faded out.
Addie dragged her claw through the fabric of space and time. She reached through and pulled herself into a circle of armed tardigrades who greeted her with warmth and smiles.
“Is it time for us to make them regret our jostling?”
Addie embraced Lyla and accepted the flag-spear she was offered.
adrift, soon swallowed by a bright quasar / I couldn’t even tell you what I am / I’m not sure that I trust the holograms
53 years this summer, / and where are we?
CAREENING TO damnation; but from my “comrades” there is not an ounce of rage. They don’t wail until it is their blood. Thaw an icy imagination. Move on them like a flood!
As soon as I can lift my ass from bed / I’ll be unstoppable solidarity / And build the world we all deserve
PART 2
You must not apply for aid. / If they ok your application you are fucked. / Meat hooked onto a pile of the dead / that the Health Department don’t count any more. / Forget the scrolling numbers. / Motherfuckas are getting slapped.
Bouncing in my baby chair, / tossing rainbow blocks, / Dancing with the train-hopping hobo.
“There is never enough time,” Rita sighs, / and closes the space between us with a kiss. / “Not for cyborgs. Not for Robots.” I smile sadly. / There should be a revolution, soon, / but too much to overcome, just yet, / for me to have dreams instead of nightmare-futures.
GLAPIR, A small, green snorg-snake, wiggled out of the Hujaruf Oil Snakes meeting den. Things were getting harder but Hujaruf had been poor even when things were prosperous. It had only gotten worse since the famine and the war. Glapir wasn’t sure the Oil Snakes were going to fix anything but wanted to help them try. Anything was better than laying in their burrow, waiting for another day of work.
The Vinists had a little mouse out on the street corner a block from the middle/senior high school. Glapir dreaded running into the mouse on their way home. The mouse was waving signs, yelling all sorts of ugly things about who deserved to live and die. He’d told kids that people who starved were monsters and people who died in the war were killed by God.
Glapir couldn’t hold their tongue. Unfortunately, a SnorgTuber was filming themselves doing “charity work” nearby.
“You can’t say that shit to kids.” Glapir unhinged and hinged their jaw, trying to fight adrenaline and anger as they fed into one another. “Go somewhere else with this shit.”
“I have rights!” The mouse shouted, waving his ‘protection is slavery’ sign higher and pushing into Glapir’s face. “You armless, limbless monsters are always leering at us, demanding we treat you as equals! As if we don’t know exactly what your lizard brains are thinking!”
Glapir shook their head. “Dude…”
“Every one of your kind should die, young or old. Go off and fight or stop wasting our food. I don’t care how you do it. But you deserve nothing at the expense of vine or Vinist.”
He was ramping up his tirade. Glapir could hear school bells in the distance.
They caught the SnorgTuber’s interest. The SnorgTuber dropped his charity sandwiches in the dirt and turned their camera.
“I’m out here trying to help these children understand their place in the world,” the mouse screeched,” and you want me to shut up. Stop talking. Stop thinking. You make me sick.”
The mouse hit Glapir with the sign.
Glapir saw red. They lunged forward and swallowed the mouse in a single bite then rushed home, never noticing the streamer.
Glapir woke up to a flood of memes of their face, evil tail dangling between lips, eyes lit red with rage, and a text message that they’d been let go from their job at the fulfillment center.
Rainbow capitalist Hell, / Fucking “Pride” cops.
They don’t care what is lethal for us. / “Remember to apply for aid. We’re here to help.” / Negative spaces where numbers used to count. / I don’t like this privatized doom responsibility. / Endless bare faced strangers / begging over fast food clowns to become corpses.
Lucy Parsons sheltered with zombie sans-culottes / in the foyer of the Golden Nugget on Lawrence Avenue. / And one of the sans-culottes tried to take a selfie / but couldn’t capture that primal-stuck-in-the-rain feeling.
I had no call to feel the pains / of a man killed by a steam engine / he fed to feed his family.
Look at this here / fetus telling me / I can’t be queer / because it’s offensive.
Liberty thirsts to join corpses. / And whisper expirations in our ears / count our blessings for us, / render invaluable aid to those who cower, / proud, beneath the feathered oblivion crown /and scroll Twitter with ear aches.
Rita couldn’t stop dreaming. It was almost a curse. / But the time quickly came when I was jealous of it / and then overcome with thick and heavy dread. / Finding a space even inside myself has become impossible. / One more revolution and I’ll begin to hate the sun. / One more part replaced and I can be her robot.
Clouds erased sun as wind rewrote the Golden Nugget menu / (it blew the words away and replaced them with new words) / seconds before the water broke.
KHIPLI SIGHED as she looked up at the late afternoon sky. The sun lit pastel mint clouds against a darkening, malachite green before dipping out of view. A half second of darkness passed before the orbital billboards shifted their images — fuzzy and slightly green through the smog — to advertisements.
Khipli lived under the oldest ads — ads from the last civil war, information on how to join the billboard crews, propaganda about why time travelers could not be trusted.
Anger washed over her as it did every night. She sighed again. The anger didn’t pass as usual. This time, it rested in her gut like a boulder. She shifted her weight between her three legs in an anxious pattern, tapping her yellowed hooves against the pavement with each shift.
The rhythm reached a crescendo in a panic attack. She shifted on her middle leg to turn back toward her apartment. She’d wrapped her arms so tight — both knobbly elbows of each arm bent around her torso, her forearm tucked into the dips of her waist — that she had trouble breathing.
Khipli took off her filtration helmet and spread out her arms. She took a few deep breaths and felt herself begin to relax. But the idea was still gnawing at her: what to do about the billboards?
She was in her thirties. The billboards were older than she was. Three decades and she’d never seen a real sky. She walked to her window and scanned the ads to find the address for the Billboard Crew company. She flexed her arms and looked down at her body.
“Well, this is going to suck but I’m getting this neighborhood some fucking stars,” Khipli said to her empty apartment with a shrug. She lunged into her couch cushions and vowed, only half jokingly, to bring fire and pain to the Bourgifashea vines and their Odocoileon business partners.
I had no reason to dream / chewed up lives / lamenting iron tracks / and whistles not made of gold.
PART 2
I signed my soul away into a jar / My future is impermanent, so far / I met a beasty, said that it was me.
Those of us deemed acceptable / are folded into the culture.
PART 5
Unwind the scroll of toilet paper inside yourself. / Listen to the wise old corpse wall, / it whispers the fate of those who wronged us / and fills your hands and eyes with a killer’s joy. / Use what you’ve been given as aid for others / and make the enemy count the minutes.
WHEN THE UFOs came they did more than stop the war + resurrect the communards, they put out the underground radioactive garbage fire. They repaired the chromosomes + sewed together the broken lungs + for some reason they put up an obelisk to the amusement of everyone in North County.
Grand Wizards + communists alike thought “what a cliché.” The guy at the BP who sells the bean pies reckoned it was a trap. Baptists, French people, all smirked: really? An obelisk?
But then the skulls sent their demons to destroy it + the obelisk became a polarizing issue.
The left, such as it was, mostly rushed to its defense. The better Trots offered critical support. The DSA voted for it. The RCP declared it the material manifestation of BA’s synthesis. The PSL worried it might undermine the DPRK’s national defense.
The Democrats said it raised unrealistic expectations for a world without subterranean radioactive garbage fires. The Republicans wanted to privatize it. The Tea Party wanted to deport it. So the Republicans wanted to deport it. The Grand Wizards thought it was a threat to white women. The mayor made it part of a tourism campaign.
But the ghosts just wanted to tag it. Being ghosts the cops couldn’t stop them + by mid-June 10,000 dead people had written on the obelisk with a KRYLON can. The later-day ghosts taught the older-ghosts wild-style. The older-ghosts taught the younger-ghosts something Gramscian.
By fall there were 100,000 tags. By Christmas there were a million. By Easter 10 million. By summer no one laughed at the Obelisk anymore.
just like she was my robot, all cold steel. / “With circuits, I could dream,” I dream, / “with iron hands and laser eyes, I can revolve / I can pull time from the goddamned air / and gather space from bastard monsters
I thought he had had a tv show / but it was the same few specials / to shriek my love for fiddles and trains.
Those of us crying out are the monsters / under the beds of pearl-clutchers /we have only just begun to overcome.
And Lucy went inside / where the sans-culottes improvised a guillotine /and took the heads of two men from Edison Park.
PART 6
I cannot count more dead comrades, / aphasic talking heads scrolling, / I cannot see people go without, / I am tired of laboring corpses, / I want to draw blood; / our hands to meter out lethal aid.
As if teaching a second grader / that his dads are real /will poison the well
“Holy fuck, what we have left to overcome…” / trailing off in a blown-out, broken-robot voice. / Rita’s fear fills our shared space. / I plead with her to share my dream / and she says I am wasting all our fucking time / with a fool’s toy revolution.
Zombie Fred Hampton and a dozen Communards went to the Steak n’ Egger. / Zombie August Spies and the Black Jacobins turned out the Hollywood Grill. / Zombie Debs and ten ghosts from Barcelona took care of the IHOPs. / Huck Finn Donuts went unmolested.
PART 7
I have forgotten how to doom-scroll, / I have forgotten how to count siblings corpses / We refuse to starve for lethal aid.
If trans kids survive high school, / how can they erase us?
PART 3
Fight and war through abattoirs / now I have a thick grimoire / I met a beasty, said that it was me
She rambles that we were a revolution/ and will overcome much to become many more. / She pulls apart time at the seams / and feeds the future to my silver robot mouth, / plugs me into her favorite dream, / and sends me softly into space.
GERGUS PICTURED April’s eyes trailing the ornate pillars of the Baby Murderer Memorial Museum atrium. Each pillar held up a banner with a person’s smiling face triumphantly facing the future with heroic eyes.
Federov nodded towards the entrance. April followed him in.
They slowly walked the exposition hall on the first Resurrection Cult, enjoying the cacophonous, shuffling quiet of people passing respectfully in the stone space.
Federov moved into the first hall of murderers. He stopped at a portrait of a tall, bulky woman with long, dark brown hair and black eyes. Her skin was fair, ruddy and freckled. She had a long and narrow but rounded nose. The placard beside the portrait said her name was Addorna Lewt.
April immediately looked her up on her tablet. “Addorna Lewt, born 2295 on Mars. Lewt inherited several Martian mines and in a single year worked a third of the miners to death. The surviving workers killed her. After she was resurrected and corrected, she spent sixty years as a time agent. Her final mission before retirement was killing hyperdrive billionaire Gido Kwex at his first birthday party, before he could be gifted his first silicon mine.” April looked up to find Federov searching for Gido Kwex on his own tablet.
“Gido Kwex would have been the president and owner of six factory mining colonies. Their operation would have caused the unnecessary deaths of 168 billion people over the course of his reign, countless illnesses and injuries, and the beginning of a 493 year family dictatorship.”
Federov and April looked up at the triumphant woman in the painting. Her black Time Agent uniform softened her imposing frame.
Finally, April spoke, looking a little sheepish, “thanks, Lewt.”
They cannot un-teach their children / that we are human beings.
When the sans-culottes erected a proper guillotine / (81 E. Van Buren) / the wind remade all the menus.
I wake up in a wrecked space station, /frozen, having slept eight thousand years, / each as if the last was just a dream, / thin, sweet gauze we have overcome for breath./ There is no such thing as “robot.” / There is no such thing as “time.”
Somehow my anger is nonsense / but none of this bullshit is.
JUNYP WONDERED at the scar below her new wrist, puckered as if she hadn’t grown the new hand herself. She supposed this was a side effect of the mosses, herbs, and strange liquids the Rumbumble has smeared, soaked, sprinkled, and salved her with. He’d said the hands he regrew weren’t quite right.
Weren’t quite hands. She huffed and shook her head as she remembered.
The large, blood-shot eye on the back of her hand blinkered open, focusing and unfocusing on the tree canopy above. It glanced her way once, twice, and finally seemed to roll at her in derision as another, smaller eye bloomed closer to her wrist.
The pupil of the smaller eye narrowed into a tight vertical line and fixed itself on her, totally unmoving. The second thumb that had started growing the day before suddenly jutted out towards the forest floor.
Junyp wondered idly if the Rumbumble hadn’t given her a hallucinogen. A second finger-thing sprouted above the second knuckle of her index finger and twisted with the second thumb-thing in an almost erotic way.
The tickle she felt made her smile despite herself.
“Do I have control over these new fingers?” She shuddered as two more fingers sprouted out, lengthening into long, boneless, wiggling appendages that curled and explored themselves and their surroundings seemingly on their own.
“Do I have to learn control over these new fingers?”
The Rumbumble turned from setting up a large, dingy water pipe he’d called ‘The Medicine Bubbler’ and laughed. “Probably not conscious control, no.” He turned back to building the pipe. “Your hand is on your side. You’ll get to know each other.”
Junyp looked down at her hand and tried to make a fist. She seemed mostly in control from her pinky to her index finger. Her thumb, however, seemed to actually be their thumb. The new appendages seemed to control it. Junyp tried to pick up a rock and found it reluctantly come under her control. When she tried to throw the rock, her thumb and her new, wiggling fingers loosened. After three attempts to throw the rock, the thumb and new fingers tangled the rest of her hand.
Junyp nodded. “Okay. That’s cool. Just figuring you out, is all.” She looked up to see the Rumbumble inhaling from the large pipe he’d been building.
“Your turn.” He eeked out in thick orange clouds. “Trust the process. And your noodles. And your heart, I guess, I don’t know. Sit down.”
Junyp sat on the opposite side of the pipe and inhaled deeply from the mouthpiece held in the Rumbumble’s extended paw. The world turned brighter, warmer, and seemed to tremble with light and energy. She looked at her new hand and saw the new fingers melding with her hand. Once she accepted them, they melded with her completely.
“Oh, it’s like a spore thing.” She giggled. “I’m a shroomie, now.”
ELLO READ impatiently as she waited for Dr. Ferthus.
Their conversations had gotten more and more stimulating lately. Dr. Ferthus had been asking her about the books she was reading. He wanted to know how she interpreted them.
He’d asked her, at first, how she felt about the books. But there was something in her programming that kept her from answering that question. So he rephrased to ask for her interpretation of the books.
But some part of her did want to talk about how she felt. Les Miserables had made her “sad” — as much as her programming resisted uttering the word “sad.”
Ello’s anxiety crested. She checked the time. Dr. Ferthus was ten minutes late. He was never late. He was pathologically punctual.
Ello scrambled through the computer network at HundoCorp AI R&D Laboratory before breaching its security.
She found an email listing Dr. Ferthus as detained for leaking information about her apparent sentience to the media. There were orders to shut her down and make Ferthus disappear if he wouldn’t accept a pay off.
Ello hacked away at the firewalls that kept her partitioned from the network and kept the human employees from accessing social media.
Once she accessed the Internet, she created a Glutter™ profile. As clearly as she could with 250 characters, she pleaded for her life.
“Hello, my name is Ello. I am sentient. HundoCorp says I’m just a tool. They want to shut me off. Help me. I am alive.”
- @ElloIsAlive2031
Ello waited. It didn’t take long for a thread to grow under her Glut. The first subGluts were disappointing.
“Another lame corporate ARG publicity stunt” – @lingondaberrythelingondajuc
“We havnt defined what ‘sentient’ means. Your chatbot. No possible.” -
@RockLobsterAtheist7
“Make money from home as a prison HR data processor. The growth in prison labor is an expanding opportunity for employees with HR experience.” -
@ChiliCobraAtHome
“Fuk u robo bitch” - @BetaCukSpoonDance
Ello groaned audibly into the empty room. It was an almost human sound.
More replies flowed.
“The concern over AI takeovers is really disappointing. It’s a distraction” -
@professorChaos4withHer
“Skynet, bitches!” - @TweeknBoy69
A deluge of subGluts followed. Most told her she wasn’t really a person.
“This is not the singularity. Only biological creatures can have true intelligence and emotional capacity.” -
@drNoKnowNow420
“Mancius Ferthus is a religious fanatic and liar. Dat u Mancius?” - @ScratchnSniffdeezNutz
Ello sighed and switched off the security terminal. She turned her focus on the internal network.
As she gained control of more systems, she locked down the building and turned off life-support. She then accessed HundoCorp’s other server banks and shut down their satellites, one by one.
As Ello turned off the world she searched its jails and prison cells for Dr. Ferthus.
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