Porn & Revolution in the Peaceable Kingdom

by Micaela Morrissette

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Long ago, the earth belonged to the humans. The animals lived desperately in the forests, foraging or hunting their way from meal to meal; or they were farmed as dumb livestock, to labor or to be slaughtered; or else they were kept as pets, vessels for loving kicks or cruel caresses. The humans spent most of their time making tools for everything, and they did it very well. In the end, so successful were they in devising their tools and machines that any problem that might arise could be solved without more being required than the flipping of an on switch. Over the millennia, even the machines were hardly called upon to do any problem-solving work at all, as they found themselves faced with fewer and fewer problems of any significance. Humanity ceased to evolve.

  The animals and other complex organisms, on the other hand, found life greatly problematic, more so every day. With nonsentient meat grown in vast industrial laboratories, only small numbers of the most delicate and sophisticated cattle were raised for the tables of the very, very rich. The planet became one thriving multicultural city, a city that spanned even the oceans, its skyscrapers cresting the arching, spiny sky bridges; and lions were driven to hunt for field mice in botanical gardens and long-forgotten alleyways. Robots of devastating charm and heartbreaking loyalty took over the domestic pet industry, with merely a few highly pedigreed dogs, cats, and exotics kept on as R&D prototypes. Only those insects who were especially beautiful or macabre were allowed to live. A few germs were cultivated for cosmetic or surgical procedures or for labfarm production, and the rest eradicated.

  Pressures on the few remaining members of the various animal species became intense. They evolved exponentially. After a few eons, the humans remained stuck where they’d been at the end of the twenty-third century, and animals had become fearsome and gorgeous in both mind and body. Of course, highly evolved as they were, the animals made almost all the right decisions. They took over human society and culture, retaining the best parts, and they made use of the extant technologies, institutions, and structures. They resurrected the lost species, and treated each other justly and with respect. They treated their little humans with tender lovingkindness.

  * * *

  Tim was a slime mold, and he worked at Wal-Mart. He loved his job as a stock boy. Each day he spent beatific hours gliding over the vast, smooth floors, taking deep breaths of the ozone-treated air and tasting its clear, thin brightness. With gratitude, he’d turn his receptors up to bathe in the chilly, sharp, white light, and he’d bask in the voices of the shoppers. They bounced over and off the constant thrumming vibration of cart wheels before spinning and nose-diving back from the farthest and most fearless reaches of the invisibly high ceilings. They returned innocent and infantile: sweet, bell-like, wordless echoes, like the meaningless shouts heard in a dream, an abstract coppery ringing.

  Tim felt graceful, swinging his wet, squelching bulk around the ends of the aisles in practiced arcs of momentum. He knew where everything was. Sometimes he filled in at the checkout, and he looked forward to those occasions, too, having learned to be brisk, practicing an ascetic economy of motion and time.

  In the holiday season, the ice songs of sea lions played from the speakers in endless loops. Tim would hum along, emitting low and meandering notes, running one of his bulges lightly over the boxes of breakfast cereal, poking a gentle dimple into the cheek of each plump bag of rice stacked around a holographic display. The small variations of coldness and warmness, softness and rigidity, smoothness and dampness, quietude and amplitude, glare and matte, soothed and lulled Tim wonderfully, and he knew he was not alone in his gratitude. Most shoppers stayed for hours, at least, all of them putting their faith in Wal-Mart’s pledge never to evict anyone who kept moving through the aisles. Some animals took up permanent residence, having learned to sleepwalk, trudging slowly, very slowly, and trustingly forward, emitting long, bubbly snorts of deep velvet pleasure.

  Other animals sometimes put things in the carts of the sleepers, marvelous selections from the shelves, boxes of lavender sugar or little pots of rose-petal jams, a sachet of sweet-salted kelp body scrub or a faceted glass nightlight filled with a sparkling jelly of infertile frog eggs. To care for the sleepers. Tim kept watch for the rare moments when a sleeping shopper would make a selection of his or her own. With infinite lassitude, the sleeper would reach for a bottle of wheat juice or some prismatic sunglasses, secure the item, and retract, one nerve-flick at a time, the groping limb or appendage over the cart, until able to let the product tumble slowly in, as if through water. Then Tim would take the product and hide it inside the blob of himself. For good luck. And to smuggle it home and give it as a present to Mimi.

  * * *

  He had gotten Mimi from a shelter two years previously. He loved her tawny coloration, honeyed and blond in the summer months, and amber dark in winter, and the tiny little nails on her fingers and toes that she painted different colors to surprise him. He kept her hair and skin soft with regular brushing and scrubbing, and although he could not quite stop himself from giving her the little treats that made her plump, he was pleased that she was still small enough to curl up on him like a cat on a cushion, although she was already nineteen years old.

  He had bought her everything the Human Habitat catalog had to offer. Mimi had a pink cradle that she could set to rock at different speeds with three easy-to-learn buttons, as well as a circular music-box bed that spun in a slow circle while playing pop lullabies and casting yellow silhouettes of smiling human faces on the wall from the plastic ring of cutouts around its illuminated base. She had a big bathtub shaped like a conch shell that Tim could fill with different human-safe soaps so the taps spilled out warm bubbling water in just the right concentrations of perfumes and cleansers. He had bought her a karaoke machine and tried to train her to sing and dance for him but was touched to find that what really amused her was for Tim to use the machine while she laughed and clapped along. Mimi had a giant trunk full of every kind of costume: dirndls and hot pants and hijabs and prom dresses. Her video library numbered by now in the thousands of files. Tim felt justifiably proud of his ownership skills. He realized it was hard to know for sure if humans were still capable of complex emotions like love, but he knew that Mimi would rather be in the room where he was than anywhere else in the house, and that was enough for him. Sometimes he didn’t think that even animal friendship was all that much more complicated than the simple preference for company over solitude, when it came right down to it.

  Naturally, Tim knew that the bond between animals and humans probably had more in common with animal affection than with human love. His species had, after all, been instrumental in orchestrating the planetwide switch from two-party reproduction to universal cloning, long before Tim had been born. All animals had agreed that abandoning the mating mechanism would allow them to ensure continued, strategic evolution in controlled environments, avoiding the careless genomic stagnation that had undone homo sapiens, while also improving all-around
quality of life by disabling the hormonal triggers that messily linked sexual desire and animal-on-animal violence. Every animal was chaste now, except humans. As the humans had been deemed intellectually incapable of participating in the vote for mating versus cloning, it had been felt that to subject them to genetic reprogramming without informed consent would be unethical. Moreover, some argued, did animals really want to include humans in the pro-evolutionary clonic programs? Given their track record, let them stay in their evolutionary backwater, was the consensus.

  And so humans continued to breed in the old manner. Some animals did, after a caring discussion with their humans, either get them fixed or medicate them for pregnancy control; but Tim could not yet bring himself to do that to Mimi. Not that some of the behaviors she had begun to exhibit did not trouble him. They had warned him at the shelter that traditionally asexual species like his own tended to be particularly challenged when humans entered the late adolescent phase of their life cycles, but in his heart he had been imagining the delight of a little human infant cuddling on Mimi’s lap just as she was wont to cuddle on Tim’s. He had quite been unprepared for the shock he felt the first time that, hearing some rustlings and gigglings in the yard one afternoon, he looked out the window to find the neighbor’s Yoyo on top of Mimi in the grass, rutting ruthlessly between her legs. A wave of horror and nausea churned through him. His body went quite fluid, so that if he had not clutched a chair for support, his bulges would have poured limply out over the blue and white tiles of the kitchen floor.

  At first, in a rage, he had forbidden Mimi to see Yoyo again, but then, discovering them together again the next week in the tree house, with her on top this time, shoving and rocking, he went to speak to Yoyo’s owners. A cross-species family of spiders and scorpions, they were pleasant and sympathetic, but not prepared to intervene. They believed in letting humans act out their natural instincts, they told Tim rather preachily, and anyway Yoyo had been vasectomized, so what was the problem?

  * * *

  Tim told this story to Edwina, a fennec fox and a fellow shelf stocker at Wal-Mart whom he had always considered a friend.

  “I don’t know what you expect, Tim,” she said bluntly, arranging the folds of a unispecies rain poncho over a chimera mannequin. “We may talk about humans as if they’re animals like the rest of us, but if we’re honest we have to admit that they’re a completely different organism. We bring them into our homes and treat them as if they’re domesticated, but they’re an uncivilized species and always will be.”

  Tim looked at Edwina in surprise. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” he said. “Lots of animals can’t stand them, I know, but didn’t you used to have a little baby human?”

  “Yes,” said Edwina, “and when he was old enough I released him into the wild, where he belonged. I don’t hate them, Tim, I respect them. They’re a part of the natural world. They listen to their instincts, while we dictate to ours. When it was time for them to stop evolving, they obeyed the decision of their own bodies. Sure, when they mate, they’re slaves to themselves. But with us, with our megademocracy and our unanimous votes, each animal is a slave to every other animal. We might own humans, but they’re their own masters, you know?”

  “Not really,” said Tim. “Mimi is so cute when she gets down on her knees to beg for food, but she’s not much of a master. And I bring her everything she wants and I don’t ask her for anything. I know she gives me affection, but if she stopped liking me, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it. So I don’t think she’s much of a slave either.”

  Thoughtfully, Edwina poured a small puddle of bright green water around the galoshes-clad feet of the mannequin. “I’m just saying,” she observed, “that the humans are actually alive. Animals are so perfect that we barely even exist these days. I mean, look at the sleepers. Up and down the aisles, reaching out for products they don’t even see, much less want, just to keep from getting woken up. And everybody treats them like saints. I’d like to see them all mating like maniacs in the produce cooler, I really would.”

  Tim winced. His favorite sleeper was passing at that moment, a bacterial hive-mind he’d privately christened Sunny for the cloud of eerie yellow shimmering phosphorescence that pulsated around her ever-shifting form in its delicate glass tube as she rolled hesitantly, unsteadily through the store on her wheeled wire rack. Even though all the species were entirely equal, the animals knew the bacteria were something special, something spiritual and otherworldly and slightly terrifying but also wonderfully wise. Tim decidedly did not want to see Sunny flat on her back in a bed of produce, giggling and spilling her multiple selves from the top of her tube, but he thought he might like to take her home and care for her somewhat in the way he cared for Mimi, swaddling her fragile glass in deep pillows and silken sheets, tending her pH levels like an acolyte, breathing in the dangerous, musky, humid vapors that whispered out around the imperfect seal of her cork.

  He told Edwina he had to go change the filters on the aquatic carts for Wal-Mart’s marine customers, and followed Sunny through cleaning supplies and past pollens and nectars into the lurid pink and red canyon of the labmeat aisle. She faltered by a long spiraling roll of beef shawarma, drawn perhaps by the heat, and Tim thought for a terrifying moment that she would come to a halt and be woken and ejected for nonmovement. He had seen sleepers woken before; they came flailing up into consciousness bewildered and amnesiac and always freezing cold. But then Sunny dipped forward to nudge a tin of salt pork into her cart and trembled onward. Tim drew up alongside her and slipped the salt pork between his bulges, wishing he could fit her inside his viscous body and smuggle her out through the sighing suction tubes of the front entrance.

  “I saw that,” said Edwina, right behind him. Tim twitched: a little spasm of guilty surprise. “Don’t worry,” said Edwina. “I couldn’t care less. In fact, I support your little desecration of the sleepers cult. That labmeat is disgusting, though. When will I ever get you to go vegetarian with me, Timmy?”

  “It’s exactly the same as real meat,” said Tim, worriedly watching Sunny rattle away into the hazardous sharp zone of tools and home improvement.

  “Labmeat hasn’t died, Tim,” protested Edwina. “Death is our life force! If the meat we eat has never perished, we cannot be said to be truly living on it. At least plants have actually kicked the bucket. Some of them are even still alive while we’re chewing on them.”

  Edwina had loved striking radically reactionary poses for as long as Tim had known her, and it had always been funny and made for good conversation, but it seemed to Tim that it was getting harder and harder to tell whether or not she was still kidding around.

  “Do you really want us to go back to killing each other for food?” he asked her.

  “Us?” mocked Edwina. “I don’t recall the great heyday of the predator slime molds, Tim.”

  “Our hunting was silent and microscopic,” he said, smiling, “but we ate heartily.”

  Edwina cackled with delight and rubbed her nose with affection against Tim’s nearest touch receptor, tickling him till he sneezed, messily.

  * * *

  When Tim got home from work, the neighbors were having a cookout, all the kids swinging back and forth from the trees on long sticky swings while the female adult sipped beer in a newly spun hammock chair and her male presided over the grill, stabbing the steaks occasionally with a venomous marinade. Tim thought they looked happy and he knew he felt a little jealous. Family units had been almost entirely abandoned when clonic reproduction went mainstream, but now they were on the upswing again, with animals of various species forming domestic alliances and adopting offspring from municipal nurseries like the one where Tim himself had grown up.

  There had been nothing wrong with his childhood, but he retained so few distinct memories of the nursery that he had to believe that little that was either good or bad had happened to him then. Now he couldn’t help staring at the spiders and scorpions—and, he noticed,
one little wasp who looked to be a new addition—as they yelled happily at one another across the backyard. Was this the kind of partnership he wanted to have with Sunny? He felt envious both of the intimacy of his neighbors’ affection and of the variety of their little family, although why a small collective of diverse species should seem more cozy and comforting than an enormous nursery of thousands of slime-mold clones, he didn’t know. Surely the latter option offered a greater number of confidants and a more reassuring sense of identity.

  Perhaps it was just that the spider and scorpion had picked each other, specifically, and had chosen their children, too. No one had ever chosen Tim for anything, except the HR manager who had selected him for the stock-boy job, which perhaps, he reflected, was one reason he loved working at Wal-Mart so much. But, he reminded himself, he had chosen Mimi, and she would be hungry and bored by now; so, on the verge of wandering into the barbecue to say hello and casually accept a beer or two, he made his way on to his own house, where Mimi was waiting with her face pressed up against the glass, making comic faces.

  For dinner, Tim did pasta bolognese with a spinach salad, red wine for him and fizzy lemonade for Mimi. He’d queued up a documentary series on great art forgeries of parasitic mimicry to watch after they ate, but Mimi grew bored and complaining as soon as the first test-yourself quiz popped up onscreen, so Tim let her put on her favorite musical, about a human girl who marries her canine owner and becomes so wealthy that she possesses humans of her own. It was a made-just-for-humans movie, which explained the love affair between human and dog. Tim was always slightly disconcerted that the schlocky, sugar-coated forty-minute videos produced for human consumption tended to favor the same romantic human-on-animal plotlines as the ultraextreme, nearly illegal bestiality porn that some animals apparently were into, but the humans loved the films, and the relationships were, after all, entirely innocent.