The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  “You can, and they do,” Aratta replied. “Young adults have no real interactions with older adults. Their interactions are largely confined to people their age.”

  “But they have to communicate with people of all ages at work, no?”

  “The vast majority of them spend their days in learning institutions, thrown together with other people their age.”

  They both peered at the open dark desert.

  “They’re cracked, aren’t they?” said Jetro Lan. “Mental.”

  Aratta grimaced and massaged the back of his neck.

  She said slowly, “I think what is to happen to them will be for the best.”

  Aratta did not respond. He kept gazing at the moonlit mountains.

  From somewhere came the sound of people stepping on gravel. Soon, Rafirre and Puddeck swung into view and joined them. Aratta made introductions.

  Like Jetro Lan, Rafirre was not from Earth—albeit his world had precious little in common with hers. Getting an eyeful of her, Rafirre reminded himself to get himself three ripe and hot bitches. The likes of her. In a few months, he stood to gain enough stature to maintain a harem.

  Jetro Lan repeated what she had told Aratta about the incident back at the house, and the two men chuckled, while Aratta regarded them with mild disapproval.

  The young woman turned to Aratta, remembering something. “What was the thing Brandon spoke of—about being ‘marked for life’?”

  “A public registry numbering over three-quarter million of their people who stand condemned,” Aratta explained. “The registry displays their addresses and photos. Hundreds of millions of fellow citizens may browse and note who is on it.”

  “One of the fine gems to brighten my days here on Earth.” Puddeck cackled.

  Jetro Lan ignored the man in violet. “Condemned of what? Are murderers on this list?”

  Aratta shook his head. “Not unless they had first touched their victims inappropriately.” He looked at her. “Are you sure you want to go down that rabbit hole? It winds up at the miasmic underworld of Earth.”

  She just looked at him.

  He sighed. “I guess I better show you then.”

  Aratta closed his eyes, searching. Countless records flashed in his mind’s eye as he swiftly made connections, one leading to another. Finally, he motioned to the three of them to huddle around.

  The world vanished about them and rematerialized elsewhere. The four of them were now standing in what appeared to be a deserted, run-down area of a nondescript city.

  “You see this man?” asked Aratta. In the dusk, they could make out a lone man in his early thirties hurriedly walking down the street across from them. “This is Jeffrey. When he was twelve, he played doctor with his stepsister, that is, he pretend-examined and otherwise touched her private parts. Presumably, he was naked, and at some point, aroused. The police were notified, and his adolescent life was transformed into a series of prison cells and sex treatment centers where he was administered psychotropic drugs.

  “When he was released from jail, he was removed from his family and made to live in a foster home. At the age of eighteen, he started attending a local college, and the police tailed him throughout campus as he is a Sex Offender. Eventually, it became too embarrassing and intrusive, and he just dropped out. He moved to another state with the hope of starting a new page. But his Sex Offender identity was available for all to note, and he had difficulty finding work. Currently, he lives with some other lepers under a bridge as he cannot reside within a fifteen-hundred feet radius of day-care centers, schools, parks, and, libraries, and did not find a qualifying place of residence. He works the occasional odd job. Once every other week, he has to report in.”

  The world blurred and changed, and they were back in the gazebo.

  Aratta turned to look at Jetro Lan. She had a look of horror on her face.

  He shouldn’t have shared Jeffrey’s account with her. He stepped up to her and put his hands on her shoulders, squeezing them for a moment. Her eyes focused once again. Aratta knew nothing prepared her for this. Nothing could prepare anyone for this.

  She looked away at the mountains and twinkling stars, and he let go. “It is utterly devoid of any compassion or humanity,” she choked, aghast.

  “In part, because it’s not a human creation in the usual sense. It’s an outcome of political posturing, lynch mobs, and laws seared with a scorching branding-iron into their books. It’s a creature of fear hardened into deep loathing and untrammeled by—”

  She lifted her arm, and Aratta fell silent. “I’d rather not hear anymore about it,” Jetro Lan said in a hushed tone, feeling overwhelmed.

  She shook her head angrily as she played back in her mind some of the things she’d just heard. This party was a mistake. “I don’t care to interact with the indigenous population anymore.”

  “This would be perfectly fine,” he assured her and bowed.

  “I would appreciate it if what you told me will remain between us. My team members don’t need to be exposed to such…precepts and notions. No one should,” she muttered that last under her breath.

  “By your leave, we’ll shortly head out to base.” Where she planned on taking a long shower.

  Puddeck, Aratta, and Rafirre bowed. She bowed in return and strode off.

  They watched her go.

  “So this list contains children who touched each other.” Rafirre chortled. “Won’t that include practically every child?”

  Aratta’s eyes crinkled in a suggestion of a smile, recalling his travels in Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa during his first century on Earth.

  He said, “Here and now, some children are playing doctor, as they may refer to it. But only some of the parents become aware of it, and only a few of those will report it to the authorities,” he said. “So all in all, not many get snared in the predatory dragnet.”

  Rafirre asked, “In that case who is on it, predominantly? Who are the marked ones?”

  “The sex offender registry lists adults who committed heinous deeds, such as sexually coercing children. Yet, it also includes men peeing out­door and those who streaked. It lists teenage girls who posted nude photos of themselves on the Internet. And it lists young lovers who have had sex. About one-fifth of the Condemned are under the age of eighteen, some as young as twelve.”

  “How do they catch them?” Rafirre was curious.

  “At times, outraged parents report them. And in some cases, the police entrap people.”

  “Oh?”

  “An undercover female agent may feign interest in a man, then at some point introduce the idea of having sex with the agent’s pretend younger sister. If the man indicates he is not interested, he may still be arrested if he ends up chatting online with the alleged younger sister. In chat rooms, the entrapping agents may repeatedly steer the conversation back to the prospect of having sexual activity with an adolescent. A nineteen-year-old man chatted for days with who he believed was a twenty-five-year-old woman who kept pushing him to have sex with her fourteen-year-old sister even though he stated several times he was not interested. Eventually, after hundreds of text messages, the man agreed to have sex with both females and was arrested upon arrival. His life has been effectively over from that point on.”

  “Taking the initiative—I like it!” crowed Rafirre. “They could also flush out would-be thieves this way. Leave an open bag with a few million dollars in a car with rolled down windows on a quiet roadside. Then they apprehend all the passersby caught with their hands in the cookie jar.”

  Puddeck guffawed. He fist-bumped with Rafirre.

  Aratta shared a smile with them. He went on, “A few hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation costs, a few years of getting beaten up or raped in prison—and finally the Condemned stumble out under a gray sky, blinking at what are to be the first days of the rest of their l
ives.

  “Unlike convicted murderers who have served their prison term, entire neighborhoods are in effect off-limits to Sex Offenders.”

  He continued, “Feces is being left on their driveways. Neighbors shun them. And when the probation officer visits them, it is with a car clearly marked ‘Sex Offender Treatment Program.’ Many Condemned are not allowed to watch R-rated movies or own any sex toys. When they travel, they have to notify each county’s police department the address of their stay. Their passports come with a unique identifier, which typically results in them being turned back once they arrive at the country of their destination. And when they have grandkids, they may not come near them. Many people on the registry are thinking of killing themselves daily; death is the only thing to offer an escape and reprieve.”

  “The population at large? How does it react to all of…this?” inquired Rafirre.

  “With a great measure of content. In fact, there are those who clamor for castration or to throw the Condemned into a lake of fire. The people around here can be like this.”

  Rafirre grinned to himself. Unless of course the perps in question were Muslim migrants actually gang-raping adolescent white girls in Western Europe, at which point the lynching brigade and the trumpets of vilification fell silent. Cognitive dissonance among the Terraneans was a never-ending source of amusement for him. The Earth people were adorable.

  He asked, “Are there no voices rising in protest?”

  “Anyone who questions this draconian scheme exposes himself to personal attacks and to a sneaking suspicion,” replied Aratta. “Americans strike out militantly as a first resort against presumed or potential victimizers. They are prone to sexual hysterias and moral panics, and politicians bank on it, out-zealoting each other. Witch hunting is a thing here. There is also a ratcheting effect. No public figure will dare propose to dial back the severity or breath of application of the related laws. On the other hand, either a politician looking to boost his ratings or a horrific case may take things up a notch.”

  Aratta smiled. “Where fear is the order of the day, safeguards are the name of the game. Tough on crime, tough on terror, tough on drugs, and back in the day, tough on women-ravishing black folks. You get the idea. Apprehension shapes and fuels much of their norms. Americans love big prisons full of bad people who are raped behind bars. They love combat drones that strike down bad guys.”

  Rafirre suddenly beamed. “You know, I think I’m going to enjoy my role in the hearing.”

  Aratta glanced at him. “Judging by your grin, I think you already are.”

  Rafirre’s smile broadened.

  “Well then, viewing and storing explicit images of a certain age range is forbidden, huh?” mused Rafirre.

  “Aye,” said Aratta. “People under eighteen are forbidden to make or model in sexually explicit photos of themselves. Those convicted of poss­ession of such images or videos may serve terms longer than those who have battered a child or killed an infant.”

  Rafirre shook his head in incredulity.

  “In fact,” commented Puddeck, “the images in question don’t even have to feature a person under eighteen. It is enough people believe it to be the case. Cartoons and animated movies along these lines are also forbidden,” he added. “Thus, it is written: ‘Thou shalt not make images in the likeness of a person under eighteen.’”

  Rafirre mulled this over. He wryly wondered why the local authorities had not been imprisoning and putting on a registry those who watched slasher films or those who, virtually speaking, sprayed people with bullets in online video-game environments.

  Puddeck was still at it. “Come to think of it, a person doesn’t even have to view any images at all, merely fall for a clickbait promising pictures of pretty teenage girls.” He spread his arms. “And since the thought is a crime, the police can stop sitting on their hands and expose the lot of them.”

  “What do you have in mind?” asked Aratta, settling in to listen to one of Puddeck’s fanciful ideas.

  “‘Teens’ and ‘youth’ are the most common age-related sex search key­words on the Internet,” declared Puddeck. “This is in the context of close to one hundred billion online views of porn videos each year, a sizable number of which feature teens. Put the two facts together, and the conclusion is both inevitable and harrowing: The predators are everywhere—in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each of them carries the germs of sexual malignancy.

  “We can no longer deny the truth,” asserted Puddeck in his baritone voice. “There is a widespread infestation of perverts in America. Who knows how many millions of fellow citizens look human on the outside but are in fact would-be predators on the inside? Need to flush them out en masse and make America safe again.

  “I say, send every man in the land an email containing dozens of risqué drawings depicting youthful females of high-school age. The illustrations are to come with a cleverly embedded tracer program. Anyone who chooses to keep opening the string of files with these pictures more than needed to ascertain their perverse nature will be picked up. Concurrently, the police will compile secret lists that include those who clicked on any of the millions of porn videos tagged with the keyword teen, notably those videos simulating ‘underage’ teens.”

  He paced about. “Ahead of time, authorities are to commandeer freight trains and set up a sprawling archipelago of gulags. This sting operation is something that can instill national pride, energize the economy, and give people a sense of focus and purpose. It will create millions of new jobs due to the need to construct numerous new prisons, set up mandatory sex reeducation camps in every city, develop more potent antipsychotic drugs, and ramp up the production of electric-shock GPS controlled ankle bracelets.

  “It will call for the training of millions of parole officers, undercover agents, and examining magistrates. And the best thing, everyone can take a part and do their civic duty: sitting on juries during the day, patrolling shopping malls in the afternoon, scrawling on sex offenders’ doors the scarlet predator’s fang sign at night, and hurtling tomatoes at their windows on the weekend.”

  “Visionary as always, Puddeck,” said Aratta cordially.

  “I can see it as clear as day,” said Puddeck, gesturing grandly. “Thous­ands of trains with open-wagon freight cars slowly snaking their ways and packed with tarred and feathered folk devils wearing armbands with yellow badges. The endless throngs lining up on the sides of the railroad tracks, clamoring to hang the predators from the nearest oak trees, pelting them with rotten food and offal. The predators’ girlfriends and spouses are made to stand on wooden crates in a pillory with signs that read: Ich bin am Ort das größte Schwein; Ich habe slept with a pervert.”

  Rafirre clapped his hands, delighted with the performance. Puddeck gave a theatrical bow.

  Chuckling, Rafirre turned to Aratta. “How did this whole thing get started?”

  “Such things don’t really have a start,” said Aratta. He reflected. “But I suppose the day-care child-abuse hysteria fueled it. At least it was one of the things that did. This took place in the 1980s. California was ground zero.”

  “It began with touching, but it quickly escalated,” supplied Puddeck. “Small children attending some day-care center had their rectums and vagina penetrated with knives and forks by the staff.”

  “On my,” said Master Rafirre mildly.

  “More small kids were questioned about it,” continued Puddeck. “Naturally, statements by the children that exonerated day-care staff members were but indications of traumas too horrific to retain by conscious memories. Soon the kids caught on. The floodgates opened, and the testimonies poured in of an ever-increasing number of children: first those attending one day-care center than those in some other centers.

  “It turned out child-care workers tortured then killed pets while dressed as Santa Clauses, clowns, and f
irefighters. The small children were fed blood from an elephant and a giraffe that were killed in the day-care center. They were forced to have sex with each other. Hung from boards, screaming and struggling, the youngsters were repeatedly sodomized by several grown men. A little girl was forced to eat the body of a baby cooked in the basement boiler; another was raped with a lobster. Before parent pick-up time, some children had been bound with ropes and were used as baits in shark-infested waters; while others were flown earlier in the day to Mexico, where they were sexually abused by soldiers.”

  Rafirre absently rubbed his chin. “Were there physical or behavioral signs of trauma?”

  “What? No, of course not,” replied Puddeck. “It is only days or weeks later, when the kids started telling those tales, that they were prone to anxiety, night terrors, rage, sexual acting out. Pinocchio justice—poetic justice—of sort.

  “Parents spent evenings and weekends driving the streets looking for the places their children were ritually abused, tailing suspicious people. They formed investigative squads and searched for molestation sites their kiddos told them about. As the young people pointed their fingers at homes and businesses, mothers and fathers jotted addresses and forwarded them to the investigating authorities. Housewives spied on their neighbors and took down the license plate numbers of cars that looked suspicious.

  “The small children were driven around, and they pointed fingers at a bank teller. Arrested. At a passerby on the street. Arrested. Hundreds of children were naming ministers, reporters, soccer coaches, aerobics instructors, grade-school teachers, and babysitters. Eventually, they also pointed fingers at the sheriffs and social workers who interrogated them. As crime sites, children identified gyms, churches, car wash places, hotels, and food markets. The abusive underground ring went on biggering by leaps and bounds. The miasma of fear cascaded outward. Ritual-­abuse allegations erupted like tumors in day-care centers in other parts of the country and in the broader Anglosphere.