The Living

by Anna Starobinets

  The Wise One went through into the bathroom, washed his face with cold water and treated the little wounds from the bakugans with disinfectant so they wouldn’t go septic. Then he looked into the bedroom: Cleo was sitting on the floor, grasping her knees in her hands, doubled over, groaning quietly.

  ‘Are you not feeling well?’ he asked her, knowing that she wouldn’t answer.

  She didn’t answer.

  She rarely answered him when her face looked like that.

  He sat down next to her and carefully stroked her eyebrows, which she had drawn towards the bridge of her nose in an expression of pain. Cleo started breathing noisily and collapsed against him, banging her face against his temple as if she were blind. He took her face in his hands and licked her on the lips, and she did not push him away.

  She only let him kiss her on the lips when her face looked like that…

  The screeching sound of a shrieking baby carried up from down below in the Available Garden. Cleo shuddered and wrenched herself free from the Wise One’s embrace with disgust and lay on her stomach.

  The shrieking broke into a raspy gurgling as if the baby was being tickled down there and was giggling inexpertly. For some reason Layla also started giggling with him, as if she were being tickled too. Bagheera started droning out a lullaby, plangent and out of tune… Never any peace. Why was that stupid woman always caterwauling outside our window…?

  The Wise One went downstairs in irritation.

  There, in the garden, Bagheera wasn’t singing at all. She was whimpering, sitting on the ground and rocking her Darling in her arms. The Darling was grunting and choking on silent coughs, sticking out its bluish tongue; it had available spots on its neck…

  But Layla really was roaring with laughter, wriggling in the arms of a guard. Second stood a little to one side with a pale, twisted face.

  ‘Wise O-o-o-one,’ Layla drawled through her laughter when she saw Zero. ‘Make me your wife, Wise One, I’ll give you a Darling! Wise One, don’t think badly of me, I love kids! It’s just this little toad I don’t like, but I love all the others! Make me your wife, won’t you? And I’ll tell you everything! I know lots of things, Wise One, I even know about Malfunction number two! I even know that the Living’s done for! And that your System is a fake and that they’ve been lying to you for ages!’

  Second strode towards Layla and hit her in the face. She fell silent for a second, then started roaring with laughter again, her whole body shaking and her eyes goggling crazily.

  ‘…They’re lying, they’re lying! And anyone who doesn’t lie, my husband cuts open their head, right here.’ Layla poked her forehead. ‘Skin and bones, he cuts it all open and pulls out their memory and turns them into trolls!’

  The guard dragged her away.

  ‘…So will you take me as your wife, Wise One, when I become a troll? Because you’re a troll too, Wise One – you’ll be a troll and I’ll be a troll and our kids will be trolls!’

  The Healer

  Open Letter to the Council of Eight

  23rd July 472 A.V.

  Dear Members of the Council! My eternal name is Healer 12, I’m an ordinary, run of the mill doctor and I work in an ordinary, run of the mill Centre for Population Control in region EA 8. I decided that I should write to you, and all other interested parts of the Living, here, in socio, in open mode, because I have recently been having more and more doubts about whether the wise Council is aware of the unlawful acts currently being carried out in ordinary, run of the mill centres like mine by SPO officers hiding behind the ‘law’.

  Do you know that, on the orders of those whose mission is supposed to be to defend the peace and security of the Living, on their orders dozens of unregistered pregnancy termination operations are being carried out every day, primarily on women in the early stages of pregnancy? That medical staff – ordinary, run-of-the-mill doctors like me and my friends – are being forced to carry out secret ‘micro abortions’ on women who have recently conceived – telling them that it was an ectopic pregnancy or that there was no pregnancy at all, and that the blood loss that’s just taken place right there in the examination chair was caused by inflammation? Did you know that the ‘conditions of secrecy’ that have been imposed on us for carrying out these procedures in combination with the unplanned nature and urgency of the operations (instruction no. 2, as it is called, always comes unexpectedly) precludes the presence of assistants at the operation and forces us to work in premises that are not fitted with reanimation equipment? And that very often these operations lead not only to temporary cessation of existence for the foetus, but also to the temporary cessation or incapacitation of the would-be mother as a result of blood loss…

  There is blood, blood on my hands and I will not keep silent about it! I have been a doctor for nine reproductions and I have, following the commands of the Servant of Order, stained my clean incode with the blood of innocents. After interrupting each existence, I clean up my office when I’m done and I wipe away the blood, but still it clings to my criminal hands. And when I leave my office and run into my colleagues in the corridor, I can tell by their faces, by the way they can’t look me in the eye and hide their hands behind their back, I can tell that they’re doing the same thing as me… Blood, blood on our hands. And we want to know what this ‘law’ is that forces us to spill the Living’s blood.

  That is all, my friends. At last I’ve done it. I’ve overcome my cowardice and written openly to the Council in Living Journal. I have confessed, and now you may judge me…

  Dear members of the Council, judge me! As a doctor who has broken the rule of ‘do no harm’ or as a coward who has kept quiet too long, or even as a member of a criminal conspiracy, but do not judge me as a Dissident, in relation to the Defamation of Order act, because I have told you the absolute truth.

  I like this I don’t like this

  Hi, Wise One! You are viewing this page in reading mode. Unfortunately, you are not a socio-user so you cannot rate this LJ post. If you like, you can view the ratings statistics for this LJ post.

  500 653 users like Healer’s open letter

  100 687 users don’t like Healer’s open letter

  Leave a comment

  Hi, Wise One! You are viewing this page in reading mode. Unfortunately, you are not a socio-user so you cannot leave a comment. If you like, you can view socio-users’ comments.

  spiderman: healer is a hero hooray

  evelina_33: in april 471 i went to the district centre for control of the population. during my regular check-up the doctor announced that i had an ‘inflammation of the womb’, the ordinary regular check-up had somehow caused a haemorrhage. thanks, healer. now i know what really happened to me!!

  milk-cap: what a load of nonsense, why would the planetmen destroy embryos. healer’s a psycho

  mongrel: +1 gopz

  santa: healer is right, and it’s actually a lot worse than he said.

  sister_66: +100, what the planetmen are doing is an outrage. and it’s not just embryos, go on orderisover. net, people there are talking about their pauses and their friends’ pauses which have happened in the middle of the day without a trial or investigation

  healer: thank you to everyone who replied: thanks to you guys i unexpectedly became a hundred-thousander, and that’s a great honour and a great responsibility. my friends! i don’t think of myself as a hero. i just said what someone had to say sooner or later.

  second: Dear Healer, Thank you for your open letter and your timely alarm signal. The Council of Eight promises to carry out a very thorough inquiry in your centre, and also provide you with personal security for the duration of the inquiry.

  healer: thanks

  view whole thread (45 789 comments)?

  healer: update: today I got an official invitation to go to the Residence (!)

  healer: update: I chatted to the Second member of the Council and to the Wise One. Amazing, considerate people who are devoted to the Living! They took what I had
to say very seriously and made copies of all the Instruction No. 2’s which I had kept especially for the investigation. I have no doubt: with people like that in power the SPO-ers’ outrage will be stopped very soon.

  healer: update: friends, I would like to share with you all the findings of the inquiry. I am happy to report that no violations or abuses of power were discovered in the work of the SPO. The investigation revealed that the Instruction No. 2’s which staff at our Centre for Population Control were receiving on the official channel, seemingly from Order Service officers, did not actually originate with the Order Service. The Instruction No. 2’s were the product of a harmful virus which had been released into our Centre’s internal network. The creator of the virus, the dissident Gnome, and also our system administrator, who failed to trace the attack, have today been punished with correction.

  I would like to express my sincerest apologies to the Service for Planetary Order for the unintentional defamation contained in my Open Letter.

  I would like to thank the Council of Eight for their swift and timely response to my alarm signal.

  spiderman: healer is a bloody stooge

  santa: +1000. i’m deleting healer from my friend list

  view whole thread (487 276 comments)?

  The Wise One opened the whole thread and lazily scanned the final comments at the tail end of the discussion. There was nothing of interest – just the latest serving of nonsensical junk from Dissidents who stubbornly refused to believe in something that was plain for all to see.

  For a while Healer’s LJ had been a treasure house of interesting and unusual dissident types, ‘slanderers of order’, who looked fantastic on the show – real rebels. The episodes of Who Still Does Not Agree with Spiderman and Santa got the highest ratings in the history of the show, as did the broadcast of their Shameful Pauses…

  Now it had all got so boring and predictable, no more breaths of fresh air. Once every few days another post would appear from someone who thought that Healer was right to agree and there would be another slack wave of indignation from a few dissidents. Something about ‘manipulation of facts’, ‘bribing the author’, a couple of links to orderisover.net.

  The comments hadn’t contained anything like the normal fully fledged dissidence for a long time now, and any attempts that the Wise One made to use ‘slanderers’ on the show usually ended in a fiasco: the slanderers would mumble something with a haunted look in their eye, immediately admit that they were guilty of everything, hurriedly delete their comments, repent blankly and promise to get corrected. Basically, there was no confrontation, no conflict…

  But really, of course, he mustn’t grumble. The wave of dissidence and mistrust of the SPO and the Council that had been produced by Healer’s Open Letter had presented a pretty serious threat. And, glap, Second hadn’t executed Healer in the heat of the moment (he had been planning on it at first, but the Wise One talked him out of it!), and they had got to the bottom of the problem properly and punished the guilty parties. If they had executed Healer then they would’ve ended up with a hundred-thousander martyr on their hands. And now they had a hundred-thousander friend. But friends are no good for the show… but then again, why not?!

  ‘So I’ll get him on too,’ the Wise One realised with relief. ‘Healer. He spoke well, I remember… And his face was so open and honest… A good face. I’ll talk to him all theoretically, about slanderers of order, about dissidence as a phenomenon, and about his own story… And at the end of the show: an amnesty for all the “slanderers” who officially admit on Healer’s page that they were wrong and that they made a mistake… The ratings are going to be just unbelievable…’

  ‘Presenter to assistant,’ he tapped on the keyboard. ‘Invite user Healer to see me in the Residence immediately. Dress code “feeling lucky”: we’re going to film him for the show.’

  Isoptera

  hello, guest! we are pleased to see you at the gates to the queendom of Isoptera!

  Isoptera is a never-ending act in luxury, created by more than two million friends. If you wish to come in, please enter your login and password…

  Oops! Invalid login or password. Please try again!

  …Congratulations, you have successfully entered Isoptera. Please choose a role:

  larva worker soldier nymph prince

  Congratulations! You are a prince. The moderator of Isoptera will show you the way and explain our rules…

  Hi, prince! You will live with the Queen and a million other princes in the royal chambers. Isoptera is based on a real termite mound. Follow me! The royal chambers are located deep underground… Right we’re there. You see? The floor is covered in rotting grass and moss so that the Queen will be warm. And the ceiling here is low and arched, it almost touches the Queen’s back – so she simply cannot leave the royal chambers and can hardly even move

  Look how huge she is, the Queen! Ten times bigger than you – what do you reckon, will you manage?

  As in nature, our Queen is mostly belly

  But she still has tiny little arms, a small head and a pronotum, but these body parts don’t matter to you. Your place is right here, under her belly, along with the other princes. While the Queen is being satisfied by someone else, you can still be involved. You can be constantly stroking her and licking her: just try not to leave any deep scars on her body (otherwise there’s a fine ).

  And when your turn comes, you will impregnate the

  Queen. Your egg will definitely end up in her clutch – and then you’ll get a bonus!

  The Troll

  ‘…I am happy to report that no violations or abuses of power were discovered in the work of the SPO,’ Healer repeated for the third time. ‘The investigation revealed that the Instruction Number Two’s which staff at our Centre for Population Control were receiving on the official channel, seemingly from Order Service officers, did not actually originate with the Order Service…’

  ‘Stop!’ The Wise One was furious. ‘That’s not the question! My question is: how did you feel when you were following Instruction Number Two?!’

  Healer looked at Zero politely and slightly quizzically, then looked at the assistant, sighed dejectedly and stared at the floor. He tugged at his grey, greasy fringe with his fingers.

  ‘Is he really so thick?’ Zero thought. ‘Or is he just shy? Or not used to first layer… No, that’s not it. This is the man who produced the Open Letter. Last time he was with us at the Residence he could keep a conversation going fine. Maybe he’s making fun of me? Some strange type of protest, or dissidence or something…’

  ‘Would you like to be on my show?’ he asked Healer ingratiatingly.

  Healer nodded.

  ‘Then answer my question clearly and precisely. What did you feel when you were following Instruction Number Two and terminating those pregnancies?’

  ‘A great honour and a great responsibility?’ Healer suggested hesitantly and looked up at Zero hopefully. ‘Gratitude to the Council of Eight and the Service for Planetary Order?’

  The Wise One shook his head darkly.

  ‘The instructions were the product of a harmful virus…’ Healer bleated quietly. ‘Erm, I don’t know… Which line? Which line should I choose?’

  ‘Leave it, Wise One,’ Zero’s assistant whispered in his ear. ‘Can’t you see that he’s a troll? He’s not capable of keeping a conversation going, he just shuffles through a set selection of phrases recorded in his memory.’

  ‘Are you a troll?’ the Wise One asked loudly.

  Healer sighed in relief and replied without even the slightest hesitation:

  ‘Not a troll. Trolling is forbidden on socio. Trolling in first layer is impossible.’

  ‘Do you remember writing the Open Letter?’

  Healer tensed up again – the question was not precisely phrased. For a similar question – ‘Did you write the Open Letter?’ – there was a clear and unequivocal answer – ‘Yes I did write it and I am grateful to the Council of Eight for t
heir swift and timely reaction to my alarm signal’… But that ‘do you remember’ – it had confused everything somehow. It was a reference to something to which he no longer had access. To something murky, evil and terrifying, that happened before… before what? Before birth? Before the operation? Before what operation, now you mention it…?

  ‘It happened before the operation,’ came out all by itself somehow; he didn’t understand the meaning of his own words, but he immediately understood that those words were forbidden because punishment burst in his head like a piercing pain.

  ‘Before what operation?’ the Wise One asked barely audibly.

  Healer sank silently against the back of the chair and closed his eyes, waiting for the pain of punishment to pass.

  ‘It’s obvious what operation.’ The assistant leaned over Healer, snapped on a contact glove and in a business-like fashion brushed the greasy grey locks from Healer’s forehead. – ‘Here, take a look, Wise One…’

  and anyone who doesn’t lie, my husband cuts open their head, right here

  Zero saw a vertical pale-pink scar on Healer’s forehead. Neat and very small – like a slender earthworm was sticking out of his hair. Skin and bones, he cuts it all open. ‘Who did this…’ Zero touched the worm with his finger, ‘who did this to him?’

  ‘Ooh, what are you doing, Wise One?’ His assistant started fussing. ‘Why are you touching it with your bare hand, here, take a glove, what is that, skin to skin, it’s enough to make you sick…’