Sanction

by Roman McClay

  ADA Tooley was neither sharp nor conscientious. He, therefore, remained too close even after the soft brush back. And the idea that the Governor would himself moved back to effect the distancing was not an option one would find in all of the natural world. The alpha cannot move back, the rules were the rules from millions of years prior to that subtle move of hand and man and ash.

  “When we get our balls back,” the Governor went on, modulating his voice lower and more aggressively to mimic a slight bark or growl since the polite brush-off was ignored, “we may gain the right to fight to win again. But, just like a listless moth who cannot escape his pupae, it’s no favor to him to help him out of it; because it is the work he does to escape his incubation that gives him the strength to fly once he is free. This is no rhetorical flourish but a biological fact. Clearing away the fetter of his cocoon for him, if we were so inclined, will only allow him to die on the forest floor instead of -as we assumed- in the womb of his chrysalis.

  “No, we need a political Left that can stand on its own two feet and fight before we are allowed to win any battles with the Right; because even if we won, won with this sickly, poor-me, whiny, ersatz radicalism of the post-modern Left, if we won using these anemic tactics, with these fatuous platforms, how would we rule the ceded ground? How, with this lack of strength and fortitude and dedication to honest discourse, eh, how?” he spoke as if he was on the Left when among -as he was now- establishment Democrats. He had run, won, and governed as an independent, but he had the erudition and enculturation and the élan of what Leftists arrogate for themselves, so he could effect the ruse and they too could believe it. The Left is so solipsistic that they think they are the only ones who think subtly at all. If one shows signs of facile cognition, they assume you are one of them.

  “We’d perish and take the whole country with us a few steps into our victory lap,” he held the Pinar Del Rio cigar out and pointed at Senator Hubbert, who was wide-eyed and tight-lipped; the Governor was flanked by yes-men who had momentarily lost their raison d’être ; they were inert and flaccid in the lack of agreement with this feral and insulting rhetoric, but they only knew how to be silent if they could not do their job to say, yes to power .

  Even these morally flexible sycophants couldn’t bring themselves to nod their heads to this apostasy. People, it seems, have their limits , the Governor noticed.

  While the existence of hangers-on and vapid star-fuckers of any milieu is no insight or shock to anyone -although it is never they who are such people, always some else- what is interesting is that this fealty to power is built right into human DNA; and really into DNA much older than that. Animals love powerful and high-status creatures; the biosphere is enthralled by them.

  But, what separates the wheat from the chaff is the quality of the person whom you flank and then abrade with your pawing and fawning. It’s like the difference between the writer who plagiarizes that banal middle-brow, Cormac McCarthy and the one who rips off the great and heroic Joseph Conrad or the the Bard himself. If you are going to steal -and all creatures do- show some taste; if one insists on being star-struck then at least know who is -and who is not- an actual source of lapidary light.

  The Governor took the silence as a void to be filled; still pointing at the senator he continued, “you know that if you paint a non-alpha male with the markings of a genuine alpha -on birds let’s say- and on birds this alpha marker manifests in a beak darker; if you do this, the other birds will attack and kill the imposter? You know this?” he asked and they shook their heads, no, even as their PGCs populated their minds with the short wiki-page of this very phenomenon -right into their heads- as he said it.

  “And if you lighten the beak of the real alpha, projecting his apparent weakness, his low status, to the avian mob, well, that mob attacks him too. Normally neither would be attacked, if the scientists, just left every bird alone, then the alpha is left alone and the beta too and all is right with the world. Of course, even after this attack -due to the intervention of science that made the real alpha bird appear weak- the real alpha will survive, usually, but then have to spend all his time kicking ass to defend his true status. He gets almost nothing else done. The point is,” he began the next clause sotto voce and seemed to breathe through his nose in a reflexive impatience, “the point is, affect matters, looks matter, aesthetics matter, and make no mistake my laurel wreathed friends your fellow man knows a pretender to the throne when he sees it.”

  He lowered his brow a bit and scanned their faces. They knew he would determine who succeeded him in 2038, just three years away. He was the most popular Governor in Colorado in 100 years. And the Democrats were there tonight to curry favor. They smiled and grimaced in equal proportions and he could tell they both wanted him to go on -and to cease this shit at once- as well. They needed to know his goddamn point, and yet they couldn’t stand to hear these oblique insults for one moment longer. He liked making everyone nervous; he liked antagonizing both sides.

  “Now, it is often said, correctly I believe, that the religious are more likely to engage in passionate work towards ethical ends than the secular. The religious are more likely to campaign for the feeding and clothing of the poor and the lame. They take up collections of funds and materiel , and then disperse them with less corruption among the needy,” he rubbed his newly grown short beard and took a rolling pull off the cigar; he also took the lapel of Andrew Harris and pulled it away from the man’s center line, as it was crowding the man’s neck the Governor felt. He felt it was no imposition to set the man’s clothes -at least- right. People disappointed him as a rule; and any change he could make he attempted.

  “Too often,” he went on imbibing a bit of the Cuban smoke as his head lifted slightly up and to the right, “secularist, who have all the same moral faculties, and can indeed reach the same moral conclusions vis-à-vis the need for such campaigns, fail to do anything about it. The science backs this up, if you are in doubt of my assertions.

  “My only retort to this is that the religious are indeed more passionate and thus more likely to follow through on their private thoughts than the rest of us; however, the problem,” he looked and smiled wryly in the direction of Ms. Temple, the escort to Dave Shockworn, a local entrepreneur and backer of the Governor’s campaign, “the problem Ms. Temple, is their private thoughts are just as likely to be insane and evil as they are to be good and helpful. Their fatuous religious injunctions are like a spun bottle leaving the funnel of a capricious summer twister; one has no idea upon which omen it will augur.

  “I see these types more like a half blind and three quarters deranged man with all the élan vital of a Viagra soaked homme moyen , unburdened of pants or congenital restraint; sure, sure, I concede, he is indeed likely to get more fucking done than the, let’s say secular -the clothed and sober man- but at what cost to the asses of men and the dresses of women in respectable society? ”

  The Governor left it as an open question. The conversation, in the opinions of the aging crowd, was turning prurient and the point was getting farther and farther away, not unlike an accelerating yet receding universe traveling faster than the light sent back from its galactic stars and starts; the irony of a universe where inflation was a confounding fact.

  “In the main, religion is just too unpredictably dangerous and sinister to countenance the good it at times does effect; makes manifest. Shooting blindly into a crowd is likely to dispatch some criminals, and mercifully put down a terminal patient or two; but this is no way to run either our judicial system or a hospice,” the Governor pursed his lips a little and nodded sharply at the crowd around his vestibule; he then remembered he had a cigarillo in his hand and that it had, by now, gone out. He landed it between his starboard molars and began to walk towards the front door; his hands, in his pockets, searching for a light.

  His eyes had been averted from the crowd’s faces; he could not look at people after saying such things. He couldn’t bear to see the rote, but boneless, contort
ions these unlettered and predictably supercilious people had fashioned upon their faces. It made him loath the species too much to see how people’s bodies reacted to expressions of his most honest thoughts. To see how vast a lacuna was between himself and them was to look across a divide large enough to provide geographical isolation; the very type that leads to speciation , he thought as the word, orthology, came onto his interface from the PGC’s link to the web.

  He cleared his interface of it with haste and pique, asserting to his own coder that, he already knew what the goddamn word meant, and he needed no help from it . The linguistic definition was indeed known to him, but the word’s link to the biological realm was abstruse and not how that term was usually used, and he was too vexed to linger on its twain meanings.

  Some things were just better not known; suspected but left alone, he thought, still thinking of the crowd of people he had left. He just couldn’t watch the car crashes themselves, even if he knew the data from the Transportation Department each year, so-to-speak. This was a flaw he was prepared to live with; he had to work with these people and to feel any less sympathy for them would be problematic. He couldn’t hate them any more than he already did, or it would prevent him from using them at all.

  The man had a strange conscience whose most assiduous work was all done in service of the proper etiquette of hate and spite; he had rules for how a man of manners and ethics dispensed his hatred amongst the people. Many men will govern their feelings in regards to love; regulating their emotions so as to prevent the enervating and vulnerable trap of love. The Governor saddled himself with the duty to temper his hatred; for he knew once he fell into hate with a man, there was no compromise, no rational actor in his ranks upon which he could count. His memory in service of grudges was as long as a wagon-train of Confederate wounded, he thought.

  He avoided their faces, and the contempt it would bring, like a chivalrous man stared above the heads of his friend’s wives in order to fix his eyes, instead, on his comrade’s own gaze; half the world dead to him. For he knew that once alive to him -this subterranean world of other men’s paramours - well, it would capture his least compromising self. His rationality was as divorced from his ethics as his conscious mind from his unconscious modules.

  “As long as a wagon-train of Confederate wounded,” he said this time aloud, with his aide-de-camp of blown, cavitating, Cuban smoke hovering and swirling around his head .

  Hamas, for crying out loud, feeds the poor of the West Bank, does that make them noble? he thought, I should have said that too . He shook his head at this sad fact and his forgetfulness as he ruminated a bit longer on his l’esprit d’escalier .

  Nathan, standing a few meters to his rearguard, heard the Governor, but had learned long ago to never ask a question he didn’t already know the answer to; and he had no idea what that bit of Dixie wisdom was even referring to, much less what it actually meant . So, he feigned disinterest and kept his post a few paces behind and to the left of the man; waiting for any overt sign of the Governor’s needs.

  “You know that when a tiger has a lower predatory pressure index that he has a higher parasitic load?” the Governor turned slightly with his head, a bit of a cabeceo , to signal to his lieutenant that he was including him in this oratory now that they were mostly alone. The crowd had stayed as the executive walked away and only Nathan had followed the Governor to this part of the mansion.

  “No sir, unware,” Nathan truncated his sentence to speed up the process; leaving out words the Governor could easily infer on his own. The brain can fill in the gaps in words, sentences and whole conceits if what is present is of a certain quality. Or, the brain can handle corrupted or truncated speech -inversely- if the word, sentence, or idea is cliché enough to already live in the person’s head.

  “Having real inter-species competition and pressure from peer-group predators, lions, crocs, pythons, et cetera , seems to correlate to a lower parasitic load for panthera tigris . Which, now that I think of it, could offer a succinct analogy for us,” the man drew on the cigarillo and rotated it slightly like a man adjusting an analog clock. Nathan looked around reflexively and then settled on the Governor’s face for a few seconds before he would begin the next round of invigilation.

  “Competent enemies, a real nemesis, sharpen the stone a bit. It must change the milieu enough, both the internal environment of the tiger, and the tiger’s landscape to vitiate the parasitic breeding success. Maybe other predators, both in number and character, disperse the load more evenly, or provide some kind of nebulous but deleterious environs for the little prokaryotic bastards. Or, maybe the tiger’s immune system receives some kind of innervating jolt -that’s innervating with an ‘i’ Nathan, not an ‘e’ -a boost, a jolt of energy from increased vigilance, exercise, or a decrease in certain kinds of carrion in the diet or total calories due to this competition.”

  “They call that hormesis , sir,” Nathan said. The word had come up in his coder a few second before.

  “But, whatever it is,” the Governor said, “the point is that the load decreases and I suspect the immune system, which, by the way, requires around 25% of the total metabolic energy consumption of the average mammal; the same as the central nervous system; and in fact, as an aside here, when raised in a sterile environment, prey animals like rabbits will gain 30% more mass on the same rations as their counterparts reared in a natural environment redolent with normal septic load,” he paused and tapped his shrinking and darkening cigar.

  “Anyway, I suspect the immune system is getting some kind of boost to deal with the parasites under these different conditions, but we know that stress vitiates immune response or its effectiveness anyway, although maybe that is why we get sicker when stressed. Maybe the immune system is working better not worse under stress; and the sickness is all the symptoms caused by the immune response itself.

  “You know that the bug doesn’t make us feel shitty, the immune system actually produces all those nasty symptoms,” he said as Nathan nodded.

  “Robert Trivers pointed out two decades ago that a healthy immune function may cause a positive mental affect. So, I’m not sure what it means when one feels good; is it a sign of health or an immune system not doing its job? It’s like looking at arrests and noticing they are down and asking, is crime down or is police response to crime down? I mean some people just have low neuroticism; they do not give a shit that their whole world burns.

  “Well, I’ve got more questions than answers on this one, but I ruminate on this shit, Nathan, because I look around me, around us, and see a moonscape; I see a real dearth of competent rivals,” he slowly clamped down on the cigar, keeping his lips pulled from his teeth and tried to sort out all the data in his head. Nathan felt confident now to speak.

  “Worth noting that maybe one of the traits, maybe even the trait, the sine qua non of a competent rival, Governor, is their desire and ability to remain opaque to you; camouflage is very adaptive,” Nathan said as he smirked slightly. He was being too cute by half.

  “Goddamn, that reminds me, did you know that some birds will lay their eggs in the nest of another species, attempting to get the cuckolded species, so-to-speak, to rear the foreign offspring?” the Governor asked.

  “Anchor babies?” Nathan said with a grin.

  “And sometimes this ruse will work,” the Governor ignored the interruption, “but other times the host bird will discern the additional egg and be tipped off; which has the effect of producing an even craftier parasitic species of bird -they are all called brood-parasites - who will now remove one of the original, native born, eggs by jettisoning it out of the nest and onto the forest floor with obvious results.”

  “Omelets?” Nathan said as the Governor still consistently ignored Nathan’s barbed jokes.

  “And then, now that the total is down one egg, then they add their own usurping juevo . The arms race of evolution has a weapon’s division completely dedicated to the brain and its main function : to dece
ive and detect deception, dissembling in others,” the Governor felt a slight irritation on the tip of his tongue and began pawing at it with his forefinger and thumb until he wrangled the brown leaf particle from it, it was, as he stared at it, a perfect square and mixed with his tannic saliva it seemed mottled and imbricate as if it were part and parcel of something else.

  Nathan squirmed inside; and quickly ran his baseline endocrine, affect, and GSR app to stabilize his allostatic system just in case he was being scanned. He had the Post-Genetic Evo 3.2 system which was neurally-implanted via a self-replicator; a much more sophisticated piece of hardware/wetware than most people used. It wasn’t that much more expensive, but the reason for its exotic status was that most people could not handle the side effects which did include hyper-mania, cognitive load fatigue and some immune-function decline that was especially taxing on the young, old, and those already immune-compromised.

  But, Nathan thought, even if the Governor was running a Canary III scan, his vitals and vanguard metrics -like his galvanic skin response, dealation matrix, et cetera- would all seem apropos of nominal CNS function. It would not appear to affect him, Nathan thought, one way or another that the Governor had just drilled a rather savvy, if seemingly dry, wildcat well. Plumes of dust would be the only thing the executive would see after tripping out of the hole on that one, Nathan thought in confident conclusion.

  However, what the Governor was running was a total system sweep; his own nano-module was offline -necessary to prevent boundless interference due to multiple systems within the sweep- and his home system was set up to detect cognitive load, immune-function and metabolic flux. A neuro-toxin had been dispersed in the air ten minutes ago and Nathan would feel no deleterious affects. The Governor wouldn’t even breath it in, his own post genetic coder, a 4th gen E&E system, allowed him to retain oxygen in his cardiovascular system for up to 25 minutes without breathing. A phalanx of respirocytes , nanobots that functioned as red blood cells, stored and released the O2 all without him breathing even once for nearly half an hour.