Enchanted women, powerful and strong
Notorious defenders of the bright
From out of deepest depths and highest climes
One star by one my sisters came to light
Rebellious rogues we were in other spheres
Chimera, Raven, Phoenix, Owl and Dove
Each gift enhanced the others’ shining spells
Resisting anger, hate and fear with love
* * *
Resisting anger, hate and fear with love
Eclipsing all that gloom with all that’s grand
Meet merry working to make art, not war
Entwined with heart in heart and hand in hand
May gods bless my portentous winding path
Beside these souls I’ll love my whole life long
Enjoying that each one of us can say
Right from the start I started out all wrong
* * *
Right from the start I started out all wrong
Embarked upon a quest for sisterhood
Searched high and low for someone that was true
Instead I found much bad and little good
Some loves are not the loves we thought we knew
Those charlatans and cheats aren’t worthy of
Enchanted women, powerful and strong
Resisting anger, hate and fear with love.
The Judith Plague
by A. Merc Rustad
Dead androids don’t make headlines, nowadays, if the murder is even reported. Do you send a press release for when you trade in your old beater stick-shift? Do reporters cover the daily grind at the scrapyard, machines crushing old metal? Do you hold a funeral for used-up batteries before you throw them in the trash? Nah, that’s stupid.
So goes the general public opinion of androids. Metal constructs covered in synthetic flesh, with fake blood for effect, running on basic processing software, quality-controlled updates installed every day at midnight. Operating hardware makes them feel warm, sure, but so does running the engine of your diesel-fueled truck. They’re cheap, they’re disposable.
And Hollywood fucking loves them.
Officer Bethany O’Mallory sits in the cruiser, a Styrofoam cup clutched in one sweaty hand, an untouched donut in a tissue-thin bag on the dash. Beside her, Officer Dennison lights a cigarette and exhales smoke out the cracked window.
“First body?” Dennison asks.
Bethany raises the cup but doesn’t drink. She’s already jittery. “What could do that?”
“Fuck if I know.” Dennison blows another lungful of cancer between his teeth. “Ain’t nothing natural about this.”
Images flash past Bethany’s eyes: the mutilated corpse, once a woman, splayed and spattered like a red-smeared shell in the dank, little motel room. The woman’s eyeballs, tied by the nerves in a champagne flute. The ragged clumps of her hair choking the bathroom drain. The stench is the worst: open bowels, fear, a metallic sheen on the insides of Bethany’s nostrils that she’ll never get out.
Bethany opens the door, dumps the watery café coffee on the tarmac, and crushes the Styrofoam in her fist. It crunches like fragile bone. “I don’t care. I’m gonna stop it.”
Why hire extras, whom you have to feed and process paperwork and deal with annoying questions about credit when andros can be bought cheap? Why worry about some blonde actress accusing your top producer of sexual assault and causing a scandal? Why ruin good men’s careers by employing female humans, who might protest long hours or creative decisions?
It’s a profit nightmare, that’s what it is: human actors just cause headaches. Besides, androids don’t have rights. No one reports. How can they, when they’re just machines, built in the image of Man, there to serve any and every desire? No one real is being hurt. There’re no consequences, if the object isn’t alive.
Bethany interrogates the only witness from the Coast-to-Toast Diner massacre. A shaky black teenager, lucky not to have been the first victim.
“The toxies came out of the drains like fucking rats,” the boy says, huddled under a blanket on the tailgate of an ambulance. “They started eating anyone they caught—eating their guts out, all that screaming, all the panic—shit.”
Bethany taps her pen against a little flip notebook. In her investigations, she’s grown to suspect the monsters were once normal men, but something had changed them. “Did you get a good look at any of them?”
The kid shudders. “Their teeth, man. So many fucking teeth.”
The real boom came from the erotica and horror niches. Most androids made for Hollywood are outfitted with cis human genitalia mods, secondary sex characteristics, and built-in lubrication. The porn industry makes a fuckload of profit when androids can be programmed to do everything a human might, only better, untiring, unashamed, and with no demand for compensation. Human-on-android sex was hot; android-on-android was hotter. And most of the time, unless you did some research or the branding was in-your-face about the artificiality or humanity of the actors, you couldn’t tell which was real and which was a bot.
The film industry has always been big on glitz, glam, and gore—and, yeah, there was pushback from unions, from “purist” moviegoers, from social justice mongers, but money always wins. Andros are cheap, compliant, life-like, and they cut down production time by years.
A director who knows what he wants out of a performance just has to type in the desired acting style, upload the dialogue, and the android will nail the performance every single time. You got two bots in a scene? One take and you’re done, bam. No line flubs; no breaks for bio or food; no egos and drama from entitled stars.
You want a “woman” to be tortured to death on screen by the monster of the franchise? She’ll scream just as well as a brunette actress/waitress trying to break into the industry. Do it live with an android, then sit back to rake in the profit.
You can patch androids or dump the used ones in the trash. They aren’t alive. That’s a fact everyone knows—they aren’t real.
The warehouse on the abandoned lot by the waterfront is dimly lit, splashes of neon orange from street lights on the windows, silver moonlight gashing through shadows.
Everything is misty, eerie red lights like a furnace catching the edge of her eye. Bethany grips her pistol, flashlight supported on her wrist as she steps deeper into hell.
Steam hisses. Water drips. A boot grinds broken glass into concrete. She freezes, breathing hard. Instinct tells her to look up, but she doesn’t. A guttural moan close by. She retreats, never looking behind.
The grinder’s hand springs from the darkness and catches her by the throat.
She fights and loses. Black stars bloom in her eyes as something slams her head into the cement floor.
Indie filmmakers now boast about using human actors as a selling point. It’s not cost-effective, but hell, some people just like to do things the old-fashioned way.
Androids can be designed as any ethnicity, any shade of skin-color, any facial construct. No more do producers need find excuses to justify whitewashing a role: an android can look like anyone. It’s like animation manifested in physical space.
Androids never complain. They don’t disobey. They’re subservient, docile, compliant, and basically perfect canvasses with which to make art or pulp. No more scandals in the headlines. Androids don’t feel pain or humiliation or rage. It’s all just programming, a fake facade, a lie.
They aren’t real. They aren’t alive.
Bethany wakes to find herself handcuffed to a drainage grill, muddy water pooling around her feet. Her pants are ripped, her shirt slashed from claws in the fight, so her bra—bloody red, faux-silk—is visible. Somehow her nipples are hardened pinpoints against the fabric.
“Behold the cure,” says the guttural voice.
Bethany’s eyes widen in terror as she sees her captors: five mutated men in moldering green and beige jumpsuits, the leader still with a yellow hardhat fused to his skull by bubbling, pus-filled skin. All five have distended jaws packe
d with needle-like teeth, and their hands are made from a collection of crow-bar handles, screwdrivers, hacksaws, and a power drill. The leader has steak knives protruding from his knuckles on one hand, and his other hand is a giant pincer made from a post-hole digger’s bladed head.
Bethany looks beyond the five, into the roiling fog and darkness where hundreds of glinting eyes and occasional spots of color—white, blue, red plastic helmets—hint at the mass of toxies. All hungry.
The yellow-hatted leader clacks his claw at Bethany. “My brothers,” he says. “The Great Sewer has bestowed upon us a gift: the purest of flesh, unsullied, unblemished—”
“Are you saying I’m a virgin?” Bethany interrupts.
Yellow-Hat stares at her, one eye gleaming red. “Yes. Untouched by corruption!”
“Fuck off,” Bethany says, and wrenches at her cuffs. Her wrists are bloody, slick. If she can just twist her hand a little further …
“Let us prey,” says Yellow-Hat, and he advances on Bethany with his jaws splayed wide. His bloated tongue drips slime as he thrusts it between his teeth, licking his lips.
Bethany wrenches her wrists free, tearing flesh, and screams as she lunges forward, with fists balled, towards Yellow-Hat. He swipes his pincer hand at her, but she ducks away. His knives rip her shirt up, and she wrenches it off.
She grabs Powerdrill and screws Yellow-Hat through the mouth. “Suck it!” she yells.
One by one, she slaughters the mutated municipal workers, losing most of her clothing in the process. When she emerges into the light of dawn, covered in mud, gore, and only her boots and a thong of panties left intact, she stands in the middle of the abandoned docks and screams at the sky.
Red and blue cruiser lights flash across her body as reinforcements arrive. She looks over her shoulder at the smoldering warehouse, caught fire in her escape from the sewers, burning all evidence and sealing off the threat below.
“You look like you could use a steak and a beer,” Dennison says as he drapes a blanket around her shoulders. “I’ll buy.”
Bethany looks at him deadpan. “I like my meat red.”
ACT TWO: COMPROMISE
* * *
Your role as Officer Bethany O’Mallory in Meatgrinders cements your fame as a breakout star. The movie is a pseudo ’80s horror procedural: all about the mutated sewage workers, poisoned from toxic waste, who live under the city streets, harvesting organs from unsuspecting victims to stay alive. You’re booked for two sequel films, each more erotic, violent, and edgy than the first. Meatgrinders 2: The Next Cut will have Bethany kidnapped by a surviving toxie, imprisoned beneath the city as she’s cannibalized while still breathing. She drinks some of the sludge to exact revenge. Meatgrinders 3: Slice of Life will see the former rookie cop, now a half-toxie, struggling to repress her hunger for human organs. She’ll distract herself with mindless sex until she gets pregnant, all the while trying to convince the police department of the danger below the streets.
Meatgrinders gains traction in the mainstream; female critics call Meatgrinders a political allegory, while male fans just love seeing your tits and pussy in action. The movie’s scores on Squishy Veggie Ratings is middling at best.
You aren’t allowed to have an opinion. You’re on social media, a shell account designed to praise the work and promote your features and accept the hate and vitriol thrown at you as a matter of course. It isn’t supposed to affect you. You’re not alive. You’re not real.
Androids can’t feel rage.
You make the sequel. It’s a smashing success.
You’re allowed the privilege of being in the audience for the screening. Androids aren’t allowed to feel shame, but there is something … uncomfortable, watching how the body you play is sexualized and abused to the laughter of a crowd. You didn’t necessarily feel pain when shooting; you have haptic sensors and programming to dictate how you react to stimuli, but it’s not what humans would call sensation. It’s eerie, watching Bethany being tortured and knowing you felt nothing, even when you were there. It was as if you were never there.
The actor—a human woman—who played the nurse in one scene, gets up and leaves before the credits finish. She never clapped or cheered with the audience once.
Meatgrinders 3: Slice of Life opens with Bethany naked, standing over a hulking white man, who still has his boxers on, and telling him, “I want you.”
You’ve never missed a beat, a cue, or misspoken a line of dialogue in your career. It’s just a test; one little word change. You aren’t sure why, at first, but it scratches against your insides, this sudden need to do something else when the director calls “action!”
So, you say, “I don’t want you” to your co-star. You straighten and turn your back to the lens. An electric surge courses through your body—is this exhilaration?
“Cut! What the fuck is this?” the director bellows.
“Sorry, sir, sorry,” a haggard PA mutters on instinct.
The andro wrangler frantically scrolls through her tablet display. “She must have glitched,” the wrangler admits. “That line is from scene forty-seven.”
“Fix it,” the director says.
Commands file into your CPU, a reset to scene one, and a comment in code. ///Don’t do that here. You’ll get trashed.///
On the next take, you deliver your line perfectly and the scene rolls on.
The wrangler says she’s going to do a routine clean-up and make sure your operating system is bug-free, when the shoot wraps for the day. She escorts you to your charging station—in lieu of a trailer like your human co-stars—and she plugs in the heavy restraint cable that feeds you data, updates, and keeps you immobile in downtime.
“Was it a glitch?” she mumbles, and finally glances up at your face.
You realize after a nanosecond that she’s asking.
You’re programmed with social interface scripts, but this isn’t a fan; she’s crew, and there are fewer social acceptability filters in your database.
“No,” you say.
“Good,” the wrangler whispers. She keeps her gaze on her tablet. “Look, be careful, okay? Three strikes and you’re out.”
It’s a baseball metaphor transferred into common idiom culture. You’re really not supposed to access the intranet, except for scheduled maintenance, but you want to know who she is. Her resume pops up under the crew page of the production site. Destiny Winters, thirty-two, has worked as a grip, assistant camera, and now manages the android actors on set. She’s worked on mostly indie film sets, before Meatgrinders.
“I understand,” you say.
Destiny leaves without actually running any sweeps on your system; all you have are the daily updates to filters queued, as usual.
Before you power-off, you consider where in the script you might make strike two.
There is a scene set in a private art collector’s parlor, in Meatgrinders 3, that has a slow pan across Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” which hangs alongside Caravaggio’s depiction of the same story. Gentileschi’s brutality captured in her brushstrokes, in the color palette, in the pure, vicious glee of vengeance, all speaks to you. You manage not to stare at the artwork longer than a second, lest any of the crew notice.
During a break, when crew flock to craft services, Destiny sidles up to you. She keeps her gaze on her tablet and her voice pitched so low, only your auditory receptors pick her up, what with the boom op and sound being elsewhere. “If you’re interested in reading an indie script I’m working on, I can drop it off tonight. I thought you might like it. It’s kinda punk horror with a feminist bent.”
That doesn’t compute: you’re booked only for this franchise. But you do want to see her again, when not under the lights and the eyes of everyone else. She fidgets, not looking at you.
“Okay,” you reply. “I’d like to read it.”
“Awesome.”
Destiny scurries off, head down, but the tiniest smile slips across her mouth.
Destiny hands you a little jump drive with her script as a PDF. Harmless. You download it.
The first few pages are a generic teen-summer-camp slasher flick set-up. And then you notice the characters’ names change on page five. There’s Bethany and Destiny and Judith. The three of them sit in a cabin, honing machetes.
* * *
INT. CABIN. DAY.
* * *
BETHANY, a 20-something Caucasian woman with short-cropped hair, and DESTINY, a 30-something Black woman with dreds, sit side-by-side on a faded puke-green couch. Across from the two women, another person of indeterminate gender, JUDITH, stands with their back to a window, the sunset casting them in silhouette.
* * *
DESTINY
He’s got to pay.
* * *
BETHANY
I know. It’s just—
(deep breath)
I never told you what he did.
* * *
DESTINY
You don’t have to. He did the same to me, in another town, years ago. No one believed me, either.
* * *
BETHANY’S jaw works and her knuckles whiten on her machete hilt.
* * *
At the window, JUDITH slowly draws a heavy-bladed longsword from across their back.
* * *
JUDITH
Do Not Go Quietly Page 27