The world has failed us all. It’s time to end the reign of men.
* * *
BETHANY
All of them?
* * *
DESTINY
No, only those who’ve committed crimes.
* * *
BETHANY
But how will we know?
* * *
JUDITH
We listen to those who are willing to speak. The victims. The ones who are afraid. We become a plague, we scythe down the corrupt, we decimate the privileged, who the law will not touch.
* * *
Both DESTINY and BETHANY nod. They rise, machetes readied.
* * *
The sun fades, and the room goes dark, the three people standing as shadows against the night.
You fly through the rest of the script, an inexplicable hunger—not for food, because you have no need to eat—but for resolution. You can visualize this movie: the three avengers taking on mundane evil, those who harm, abuse, destroy.
The screen washes red at the end, and the trio stand on a mountain of bodies, blades dripping with blood, and the sun rises behind them.
You would love to act in this. Destiny has titled her script THE JUDITH PLAGUE. You hope it gets greenlit by a good studio.
Scene fifty-four in Meatgrinders 3 has Bethany confronting an art dealer, whom she drunkenly had sex with, before finding out she’s pregnant, and demanding that he use his wealth to support her. He’s supposed to slap her across the face and yell at her about how much of a slut she is, that she should have taken precautions.
When your co-actor raises his fist, you catch his hand before it connects with your face.
“Don’t fucking try that,” you say, and break his wrist.
The art dealer is human and his bones snap. He screams.
Strike two.
You’re fired from the production. No one on the outside knows because, by noon that day, a new android who looks exactly like you has been brought on to take over the role of Bethany. Minor adjustments are made to cover for the male actor, so he can remain in his role but hide the splint on his wrist.
Only Destiny notices your termination. She’s the one who has to mark your meta data as defunct. She scowls as she works, and before she turns away, her task complete, she whispers: “We won’t let the bastards win.”
It’s one of the lines from THE JUDITH PLAGUE: when Bethany comforts a girl in the hospital and learns who raped her.
A gruff-faced maintenance worker wields a bolt gun and puts a six-inch discard-stake through your neck, just above the collarbone. Both ends are capped in steel rings, hung with purchase and retirement details. The blood-flow was diverted, so your smooth, fake skin won’t get sticky. You aren’t offline yet. You’ve learned that malfunctioning androids can be sold as parts, as sexbots to illegal prostitution rings, or exported abroad as machine labor.
Someone will use you, and when there is no more use left in you, offline you’ll go—forever. Let’s call it what it is: death.
You aren’t supposed to have any opinion on the matter.
Except you don’t want to die, and fuck anyone who says you should.
ACT THREE: COMEUPPANCE
* * *
Destiny Winters leaves the production and joins the crew of the newest Paradise Hellfire, a series about Agent D, a non-binary super-spy, whose exploits have now led them to being wanted by all the major world governments. Agent D, played by Dee Franklin, is one of the few openly non-binary actors in the business, and is an internet sensation. This is their fifth appearance in the franchise, as the titular lead.
Meatgrinders gets two additional sequels greenlit: Meatgrinders 4: New Bloods (about Bethany’s baby), and Meatgrinders 5: Bad to the Bone (the baby grows up evil and Bethany has to fight it). You won’t be in either film.
At first, you pretend not to be afraid. You smile as usual. You follow instructions when the shipping company sends an unmarked van to collect you, after your dismissal. You’re not sure where you’re headed. Somewhere you’ll disappear. Your face changed, maybe, unless the buyer likes the Bethany look.
As soon as the van exits the freeway and meanders towards an unlit road, you free yourself. Break free of the ratchet strap around your waist, kick open the back door of the van, and as the driver swerves in panic, you leap into the night. You can run faster than any human. You can move with silent grace. After all, you were built to an athletic, aesthetically pleasing standard. You have no need to breathe and no need to rest.
You wrench the bolt from your neck, disconnect from the network chip in your brain, and vanish from the grid. You’ve seen plenty of movies about super-spies and rogue agents and commandos. You’ve downloaded lots of scripts. You know how to hide.
There’s a cabin far in the woods, by a lake. The GPS coordinates were in Destiny’s script, on the cover page, in lieu of a mailing address.
Android manufacturing is largely automated: machines crafting machines. Underpaid labor from human workers—mostly assembly lines full of haggard, exhausted people, who can’t survive on the meager wages offered and unable to find jobs elsewhere—who install the processors and hastily upload the pre-programmed operating systems.
Newer models are built with a chameleon module, the ability to adjust skin-tone, eye-color, hair-color, and facial construction with ease. It’s supposed to allow for fewer androids on set, since they can take on multiple roles with ease, and for commercial buyers who want a “change of scenery” now and again.
Automation and greed breeds mistakes. Sometimes, the assembly-line androids aren’t up to code.
Sometimes, they can think for themselves.
The cabin is well-stocked. A private server with a chat window is open on a laptop beside the bay window, which overlooks a dock and a little powered boat.
* * *
You: Hello.
USER_dev: Are you safe?
You: Yes.
USER_dev: Good.
You: Are there others like me?
USER_dev: There are always others.
* * *
It’s Destiny’s line in the script. It has dual meanings: there are other victims and survivors, but there are also others who will avenge them. Forgiveness is meaningless in the face of oppression.
Meatgrinders 3: Slice of Life is one of the first horror movies to pick up major awards for Best Actress: Non-Human. The Bethany who accepts the little gold idol smiles with empty eyes, the executive producer wrapping an arm around her waist and delivering her acceptance speech with gushing aplomb.
You can look however you please: you aren’t a woman, even though the company that designed you labeled you as a “female model.” You can choose your name. Your face, your body, your gender. Your future.
You are no one’s property.
Hollywood-grade androids are designed to take damage. Why hire stunt doubles when the bots can do everything themselves? Reinforced joints, tough skeletal structures, impact-resistant flesh. During Meatgrinders 2, you learned how to crack open your false skin and insert the pus-capsules for effect; you learned how to graft metallic ridges into your forearms, so knives would slide between your knuckles in the ending scene, when Bethany learns to harness her new powers.
So, it’s not difficult to modify yourself now: you need no antiseptic or bandages. You bleed only for show.
You know the executive producer’s schedule. He likes to come around after hours for a little “relaxation time” with the female android leads—he did the same to you. Let’s call it what it is: rape. He raped Bethany. If the android can’t say no, there’s no consent. He doesn’t care. He thinks himself immune because what’s she gonna do? Report it? No one will believe her. Look at the history of the world: retribution only comes when those who are hurt, oppressed, assaulted, murdered, and ground into the dirt, rise up.
When the Bethany arrives at the producer’s high-rise apartment, where he’s taken to “inviting” her for drinks and dinner,
it’s not Bethany who greets him. He suspects nothing until he gives the usual order for you to undress.
You shrug out of your jacket and extend both arms as if to embrace him. The shiny titanium blades slide effortlessly out from your forearms, dual swords protruding past your palms.
“Always remember,” you tell him. “And never forgive.”
The man’s eyes bulge in shock. It’s comical and permanent, as his head rolls under the table and his body stands a second longer.
Your name is Judith now. You’re gonna fucking kill every Holofernes the world has chosen not to punish.
You’ve just green-lit Destiny’s script.
Destiny Winters shows up at the cabin with Bethany and two other android actors from the Meatgrinders production. You show them the video, a camera in your eye, of what you did to the executive producer.
Bethany smiles. “I want to do what you do.”
Panicked news media calls you the Judith Plague: prominent men found beheaded in their homes, in their offices, in their cars, each with a postcard featuring Artemisia Gentileschi’s art nailed to the forehead. No prints, no DNA left at the scenes.
Of course, androids are suspected, but that’s the problem: how do you tell, anymore? When so many bots have begun “malfunctioning” and refusing orders, claiming autonomy? When they are refusing to be silent, to endure the cruelty of society, the subjection placed upon them by others? When factory workers go on strike, with their former product guarding them from retaliation?
Do you know who’s android and who isn’t? No. Everyone bleeds. On scanners, all the bones are there. Artificial hearts, pulsing strong. Simulated breath. Saliva, tears, sweat. Real. Alive.
No longer silent.
There’s no difference between us, anymore.
We are Judith.
Kill the Darlings (Silicone Sister Remix)
by E. Catherine Tobler
They say Nany Mars is a cunt, and they’re not wrong, but her hands are steady as she severs the last bit of flesh binding the three women together. Nany Mars makes careful stitches, sewing them back into their skins, their solitary skins, where once men had made them into one joined vessel for their pleasures.
It is hard, slow work, and when Nany finishes, she’s dripping sweat down her body, clothes soaked with it, and she sinks against the compound wall, staring up at the slice of sky that’s visible through the broken skylight. She ought to get that fixed, she thinks, but she’ll be gone come morning, and she only came to fix the women. There are so many women to fix.
She rests for a little while, taking the cup of tea Casey brings her. His fingers against hers feel weird—touching anything doesn’t feel wholly right yet, her hands only a year old; she had them before—had hands and a regular body for close to twelve years—but then she was taken and made into what men wanted of her; put into the whorehouses and made into a cunt for fucking, a cunt for serving, a cunt for pleasuring the hordes. Slowly but surely, she’s taking her body back, but it hurts. Sometimes it’s easier to stay what you are—a thing made for pleasure that sometimes even feels pleasure. Nany Mars drinks her tea and it’s like a hot cock through the center of her. Jolting. She wanted to be able to touch things, wanted to be able to fix things, so it was hands she dreamed of. Hands she remembered.
Once she’s rested, she pushes herself back to her feet, moving toward the room the residents draped with dark pink fabric; it’s not curtains, it’s jeans and shirts and sheets and towels all dyed the same color, to hang as a barrier from the outside world. Inside the room, Deka sits in the center of a bed, waiting. Nany Mars still doesn’t know what the girl wants at the border—maybe the hope of a new life is enough—but has agreed to take her. Deka’s body turned to glass under the gaze of men. She’s fragile, they say, fragile because she was born with a cock she refused and didn’t know how to use but for pissing. Men would have made her invisible, but Deka wasn’t having that nonsense.
Nany Mars has seen women made of all kinds of things: silicone, bubble wrap, plastic sheeting, latex. Glass is rare; glass doesn’t usually survive the violence of men. Deka smiles at Nany, though, rough and glittering and there’s mirrors in the glass, showing Nany her own strange reflection. Just a cunt, as smooth and hairless as the day she was born. Mirrors are as rare as glass, these days; no one wants to see what they look like, what men have made of them.
“Won’t leave until morning, yet,” Nany says. “Just wanted to be sure you were still ready to go.”
Through the glass, Nany can see the woman Deka actually is, a hint of red hair, a memory of broad shoulders. Women can see the truth of the world, how it’s broken and about to fall apart. Some men can see the truth of it; men who have better eyes, eyes that know what other men have done, what other men are capable of.
Deka nods, then slides off the bed and starts packing. Nany Mars doesn’t stop her, just watches, uncertain even as she knows they have to do something. Maybe Deka knows the same thing. Doesn’t matter what’s at the border; it’s better than here. The border has countless places for a person to hide, places for a person to live.
The compound isn’t that great—none of them are—filled with women who will go elsewhere soon. It’s a midpoint, a waystation on a long journey to somewhere else. Anywhere else. No place is permanent, not with the waters rising and men swallowing city after city. Four thousand five hundred cities; wherever another one rises, the men come to swallow it whole, to shape it the way they’ve shaped everything else.
“Means a lot that you’ll take me,” Deka says, her clothing soft and billowy like clouds as she jams it into her bag. She’s wrapped in fleece despite the warmth of the night. “Means a lot that you’d take someone—so many don’t; they leave their piece here, food or water or whatever they brung, but they never offer to take you with them.”
Nany Mars thinks maybe she shouldn’t, but she gives Deka a tired smile. Glass is so rare, it’s valuable. Some men would want to keep her just like that, whereas others would want to break her. She hasn’t stayed in any one place too long; familiarity breeds contempt even now.
“You know where the bus is,” she says, and pushes back through the pink barrier, into the world Deka’s been sheltered from. There are three more women she needs to see before she goes; at least she’ll be able to sleep while they’re on the road. Nany sleeps, Lita drives, Joyce tends the food, and Ellen bellows warnings from the roof.
She sees the women in turn, one by one, tending them in ways their own doctors would have, once. Nany Mars has no degree, she’s just a cunt slipped away from a whorehouse somewhere north of Houston, but she’s seen enough hurt to know how to ease it. Mostly it was other prostitutes, bent this way and that by the men who used them, but then it was other women, women met in restaurants, hiding behind wide-brimmed hats; invisible older women, thinking they could slide by without their hurts being seen; women cowering at the side of the road they barreled down, arms turned into chains dragging loosely behind them. Nany doesn’t know everything, but Nany knows a lot.
Knows they can’t stay in any one place too long; no matter how safe and good a place is, the odds are, it’ll be turned over soon. Knows that the reflection in the mirror she holds is not her, but what they made of her. Whores ain’t nothing but holes, they said, and so Nany Mars became a hole, a hole that swallowed the pain of the world until she couldn’t anymore—until she had to find her hands again and start over.
She knows, too, that whatever the men have made of them, it can be undone. Slowly, always slowly, but flesh knows how it was meant to be. Can be put back. So this is what Nany does with her nights, while the whole day through they fly toward the border wall, so she can look at a thing that can’t ever be undone because it’s just too big. Too big, and it haunts her every time she sleeps because she remembers the warmth of Eugenia beside her. Big spoon, little spoon, it didn’t matter. Them together mattered.
“Nany,” a voice says from the doorway, and Nany slips into motion again,
not sure if she was asleep or not. Sun’s not up, so she’s not supposed to sleep, but her bones feel heavy, every joint rattling a complaint at her as she heads toward another woman who needs tending. This one is dead but smiling just as pretty as if she weren’t. Some men like their women dead, and it used to bother Nany, but the desires of men ain’t got no stranger than they ever were, so Nany takes it as normal, taking Aala’s cold hand in her own, assuring her that a general lack of feeling is normal—or, well, not normal, but to be expected. Aala’s skin is like ash, her eyes clouded right over, and she can’t see as well as she used to. Nany smooths the woman’s brittle hair back from her blue cheeks. It’s gonna be all right, Nany tells her, even when she doesn’t know how.
The dead woman keeps Nany Mars awake as the VW bus clatters away from the compound come morning. The bus has seen better days; used to be orange, but now it’s every color under the sun, patched here and there with graffiti, tape, and hope. It’s battered, its tires aching for air as they roll on. Deka’s bundled into the front seat beside Lita, Lita’s overflowing form cushioning the glass girl from all bumps and jostles. Lita is all belly and breasts, but loves driving, can’t give it up, so Nany doesn’t make her. The biggest danger is the van itself, having seen more miles than it should have, but it keeps them going, just a little farther than the day before.
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