Forbidden Thoughts

by Milo Yiannopoulos

  “But—but—she has a right to life!”

  He gave me look of withering contempt. “That is the way antiabortionist fanatics talk! They hate the health of women! Do you hate the health of women? Euthanasia is a health issue!”

  I said, “We project our mind into parallel worlds for you! For the cause!”

  He said, “And if the cause requires her self-sacrifice, the corps will accept it with gratitude.”

  If I could not appeal to his loyalty, perhaps I could appeal to his self-interest. I made my voice calm and even. “You know how rare the Hell and Mesmer trait is, and how many candidates, even if they do test positive, wash out of basic training! Rarer still is to find a stickler, someone who can maintain permanent possession, overcome the thoughts of their host mind without any cross cultural contamination!”

  He shook his head wearily. “There are only a finite number of beds in the hospital ward set aside for the Revision Corps. You know we are gearing up for a major effort, and pulling our agents out of other timelines for this one.”

  Of course I knew. The Central Committee had been discussing it for over a year: We were preparing a thousand volunteers for an engagement in a world where women never got the vote.

  The problem was that the timeline faded into and out of availability unexpectedly. And if we cannot find the deviation point, the crux event where their line split off from the homeline of true history, we could not proceed.

  “I know about the Big Push.”

  “It will be our most popular intervention yet! It will silence all talk of cutting our budget! No one, not even the bitterest enemies of goodthink, will dare defend a world without female suffrage! We will be using every agent, just as soon as the crux point is identified, and we can all make a safe mass insertion. So we will be needing all the beds, and there is no room for someone we cannot make room for.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. “But then you also need her! She is a trained agent! She was on a mission when she went missing.”

  I did not tell him that I knew which world it was: Earth Fourteen. It was the one where American built a city on the moon, and was using it to build rockets for manned interplanetary exploration. Her mission had been to introduce into their press and popular entertainment the Social Justice Narrative, using the methods of Critical Theory as developed by the Frankfurt School. She was to preach and teach that the space program was immoral, on the grounds that its funds ought to be spent on earth, on the poor and downtrodden. The hope and pioneer spirit something like a successful space program inspired spelled the death to all our social justice narratives. Once men were proud and confident, able to accomplish something, they developed a false consciousness, and no longer realized how oppressed they were, and no longer were willing to hate and retaliate against the persons identified to them as oppressors.

  I mean persons, of course, not men. Animals, too. I do not believe humans are special. I am not specialist.

  He said, “Whether she was on a mission is not information you are cleared to know! But if she were on a mission, then why did she fail to return, and wake? If she had no doppelganger in the parallel continuum, she could not have inserted in the first place. If she had a doppelganger, even sticklers cannot remain in continuous possession, even with the willing cooperation of the host, for over a month, because the mutual brain activity creates the very same magnetic disturbances in the nervous system Hell and Mesmer so carefully examined, and which forms the basis of Mesmeromagnetic Paracontinuum Ectoprojection. But the other possibility is that the host died while she was in possession. So she is truly dead, and there is no need to keep the body alive. It would be a violation of her right to die.”

  So much for my supervisor. I got a different story out of Rob when I saw him next.

  Rob told me in a whisper that technicians examined her brainscans very carefully before they flatlined. The signature was not consistent with the magnetic contour needed to insert herself into the line where she was assigned, Earth Fourteen. There was no sign of her. Her double on that world had been contacted by another agent, and she never returned the recognition countersign. It was apparently the native born host, not a sleepwalker.

  Equality must have substituted another magnetic signature during her launch meditation, or remembered an old one.

  He said, “You are not going to get anywhere going through the channels. Who has the resources to look for someone who abandons her or his post?”

  My last recourse was a trump card that overrode all normal red tape: I would go to the Amnesty Officer. The one for my district had an even longer waiting list than my supervisor had, but I was able to threaten someone very high up in the queue by hinting I had overheard a sexually aggressive joke. He, of course, had probably never made a joke in his life, but he did not need the grief, and so we swapped places, and I got his interview slot.

  The interview went badly. The Nanny was an old gray-haired lady whose face was a wrinkled sagging sack of bitterness and despair, and whose eyes were dead. If I had touched those eyes with my finger, they would have been hard and dry, like touching two pallid pebbles.

  We met at her dormitory cube, which was larger than mine. All four gray walls were tuned to the national public channel, and so were speaking in soft, soothing, cultured tones about the need to reduce the Caucasian population to zero, so as to prevent strain and overcrowding on public resources, as more undocumented pre-citizens from the Middle East and China were arriving. The volume was very loud, and the speaking voices were interrupted periodically by rousing rock opera music, blaring with trumpets, screaming guitars, and a pre-teen girl shrieking four-letter-words at the top of her little lungs. I think it was the new, all-inclusive non-nationalistic National anthem that the government was focus-group testing in this broadcast area, but I am not sure. Microphones and speakers are mixed in with every batch of concrete from which everything is made, dorms and workhouses and walls and roads, but officers of her rank should have been able to turn the volume down. More likely she was half-deaf and had turned it up.

  It made the conversation so difficult, I am not sure the Nanny heard me at all.

  She said sternly, her wrinkled jowls wobbling, “You should be ashamed! There is no place in civilized society for someone who is named Crusading-for-Womens-Equality. That excludes and insults transsexuals and quasisexuals. One does not need to have a vagina to be to a woman! Not to mention her name is Islamophobic. What kind of horrible, sick person is named Crusading? Are you insane?”

  I protested. “But—we were assigned those names! We go to jail if we don’t use them!”

  Maybe my voice was loud, but then again, the six-year-old girl screaming cusswords from the gray walls was also very loud.

  “You can petition to have your name changed! It only takes a few years and the legal fees are quite reasonable if you take out a guaranteed loan. But anyone named Workmans-Paradise could not understand anything. I am amazed you dare to show your face in public, with a sexist and faithist name like that! Paradise! Pah! Now get out of here!”

  I stood up, slowly. “But—there is something else.”

  “Spit it out, you snot-brained limp-mugged retard!”

  “I want to have the body. If they kill her. So I can bury her. May I—if I might be allowed—”

  She pushed a button in his desk, and told her sergeant to come escort me out. She did not look at me, but spoke to the thug who appeared in the doorway. He was rough and red-whiskered gorilla of a man, round-faced, but with deadly coldness in his eyes. “Kick this snotlicking filth out, and don’t be gentle about it. We are going to grind his cis-female bitch up for dogfood, and he, knowing how hard it is to get everyone to recycle, and knowing how important animal rights are, wanted to bury the body in some sick, faithist ritual in the ground, contaminating the groundwater!”

  The sergeant drew his truncheon. And, no, he was not gentle about it.

  I was clever. Instead of submitting to the beating as w
e are taught in education camp, I fought back. Once, one of my slaps actually caught him on the cheek. I bet that stung! But my plan was that if he did sufficient damage to me, I might be able to get into the hospital through the shorter list for the military officer emergency room, rather than the longer civilian list.

  Well, it sort of worked and sort of did not. I sat in my gray little cube of a room, with the walls all lecturing me on how to be a better person, eat right, be a good citizen, and avoid wrongheaded thoughts, for several days. And the beating had done no permanent harm, broken no bones.

  In fact, I was perfectly fine by the time I was invited to the hospital. I walked there, past all the motionless and empty cars on the road, motorcars left over from the pre-rationing days. It was late in March, and the last snow of winter was mingled with the first hail and freezing rain of spring, so that the mush of frost was covered with a layer of slick ice. The line in front of the hospital stretched a block or two. I saw two old folk who had frozen to death while waiting in queue, but the soldiers just laughed when someone asked them to move the bodies. They were there to open fire on the crowd in case another rationing riot started. There was a woman weeping because her baby had died in her arms from the cold. People were laughing at her and scolding her, asking why she was so stupid as to bring a sick baby out into cold like this. There is not much to laugh about these days, so I am happy that the people found a source of amusement, as for the woman, I shoved her out of the way so that I could get into the emergency room doors. The nurse was sitting and smoking, staring at the blank screen of her broken computer, and the fume of cigarette smoke had filled the room, and I was able to bribe her with a bottle of vodka, and so get my chit stamped. There was a man missing an arm and a leg in the bed I was assigned, still hallucinating from the pain of recent surgery, but since his chart said he was a heteromale with one lifelong partner, this put him on the low-priority list, I was able to get the hospital sergeants to turn him out of the bed for me. I heard him screaming and raving in the snow outside, while the patients who had been waiting all night amused themselves pelting him with snowballs.

  I waited patiently until there was no one on duty. It did not take long. Hospitals are always short staffed, and when prisoners are assigned to act as nurses and doctors, most of them simply make a break for it, as if there were some place to run to. I got up, unclipped the clipboard from the foot of the bed, found the wing set aside for Revision Corps, and opened the magnet cabinet with a crowbar. Inside, neatly labeled, were the electromagnets, each one programmed with a different induction rhythm designed to stimulate the Sylvian fissure area of the brain, which Hell and Mesmer long ago discovered was the source not only of so-called psychic intuitions and flashes of Deja-Vu, but the way to tune one’s brainwaves into the brain of the near-identical twin brain of your doppelganger in the parallel world.

  There was only one place I knew her doppelganger would not be under observation by other agents-in-place. That was the invasion ground, Earth Seventeen, the one where women never got the vote. It was said to be a tricky place to enter, since the insertionist is supposed to meditate on the deviation point before calling up the hypnotically coded names and words to make the transition, and neither I nor anyone knew the point for his world. But I knew that if I entered it, I would be the only Otherwhere agent there.

  Also, nearly all the magnets had been programmed for Earth Seventeen.

  I returned to my bed, made a note on my chart that the patient was comatose and needed intravenous feeding and so on, slipped on the head band with the magnets held in place above the correct three areas of the skull, and I lay me down.

  And the rest you know. I have been looking for this world’s version of Equality Ward, my life-partner. Her name here is Mary Ward.

  I have been trying, off and on, for three months now to locate her and talk to her. I tried to break into her sister’s party just to see her; I even went to her house with chloroform and a rope to kidnap her if need be—I am that desperate! I will not be stopped! It is a matter of life and death, the life and death of an innocent girl that I love with all my heart.

  Now, I might as well tell you, since you can probably see it in my thoughts anyway, that I did finally manage to find your key and open the roll top desk where you keep your mother’s jewelry. Making an electromagnet is absurdly simple: all one needs is an iron bar and a coil of electric wire, and the needle-sized electrical batteries you people here make are wonders of miniaturization. I placed other slivers of iron into the coronet you place on your head for your meditation, but these were attuned to my personal frequency, to enable me to gain a more complete control of your body.

  Nonetheless, I mean you no harm, and I ask you, no, I beg you, for your help. Help me talk to her! I don’t know your world and don’t know your ways. Even getting one of those automatic taxicabs or whatever you call them to carry me where I wanted to go was nearly impossible for me.

  I must see her. But she has these people living with her that will not let me in the door. What do you call them?

  If I had not been out of ideas, I would not have allowed the other version of me to become aware of me.

  -2-

  As I sat on my balcony, dreaming, the alien thoughts welling up in me, memories of another world, another life, I found my limbs had fallen asleep. I could not move them. I assumed that even if the alien half of me could force me to move, I could not force myself to think. Indeed, the meditation allowed me to hold my thoughts quite blank, so that there was nothing for my rather desperate other half to do.

  I understood, believe me. These thoughts seemed to me like my thoughts, my memories, and the underlying personality was the same: while I would never even dream of shoving a mother with a dead child aside, or throwing a cripple out into the snow, on the other hand, I had been raised by a loving mother married to one man her whole life. I had not been sexually abused as a child by one after another of a series of my mother’s violent live-in lovers. I had been punished as a child for hitting a little girl once, not punished for refusing to box a little girl in gym class. And I cannot say I do not know how I would have turned out had I been raised under those circumstances: for I remembered exactly how I had turned out.

  I could not even blame myself for attempting first to act by stealth and trickery rather than openly.

  Had I been him, raised as he was, without a father, running with a gang from a young age, trusting no one, being fed on nothing but lies his whole life—lies about the nature of man, lies about the nature of truth, the nature of the world, the nature of marriage, lies about economy, lies about politics, lies about the races, lies about wealth and how it is made, lies about history, lies about science, and topped off with the hugest lies about the most trivial things imaginable, such as weather reports—I would not have trusted me either.

  I would have done the same thing had I been him. I know, because, after all, I was him.

  I felt my lips move: “You have to help me!”

  Did I?

  “You saw her photo.”

  I did. It had been love at first sight.

  “So you want to see her, too.”

  That I certainly did. I would do anything to see that face again.

  “I met her in school. We were assigned to the same room at Wesley. You were supposed to meet her, but something kept you apart, some accident in this world.”

  In this world, Wesley is an all-girls college.

  “Who are those people who prevent me from seeing her?”

  Her parents.

  “Marriage was abolished in my world. The government has no part in how to define love! Marriage is just a way to transfer ownership of a woman from her father to her husband. Women in our world are free.”

  Well, in this world, no father in his right mind would allow a gentleman caller to visit his daughter unannounced, alone, with no reason or explanation given. Small wonder he threw you out the front door. What did you expect?

  “I told
him I was a sexual compliance inspector, pulling a surprise inspection on his daughter’s vagina, to make sure she had performed penis-in-vagina sex with blacks and hispaniards, penis-in-anus with nethermales and vibro-in-vagina with the right number and racial classification of other nonhetfemales or otherhets and the other approved minorities.”

  You are lucky he did not kick your teeth in. Damn! The only reason why I do not kick your teeth in is that they are my teeth, too.

  “Then you will think of a way to see her? You know me, you’ve seen my thoughts. You know I would never harm her.”

  Give control of my body back to me, and I will ponder the question. Otherwise I sit here with my mind blank, and your version of Mary Ward dies.

  And when I raised my hand to snap my fingers, it worked.

  -3-

  I watched myself without understanding what I saw. I made a phone call or two, first to her college alumni office, then to some family friends, and then to an opera house. That evening, during the intermission, I saw the girl, Mary, in the crowd. She had an odd look on her face, a poker face, calm and watchful, wary, while the other young ladies around her were laughing and chattering gaily. I walked up to the tall older man who was hovering near her, and introduced myself. This was her father. He and I spoke briefly about a series of inconsequential issues; he introduced me to his wife, and I bowed over her hand, mentioning how envious any unmarried man must be of someone who has found domestic bliss.

  And that was all. Mary, the daughter, I was not introduced to, even though it was obvious I could not keep my eyes from her.

  It seemed that I was a wealthy and eligible bachelor in this strange world where people owned their own property, and for some reason, that made me desirable in the eyes of parents looking to find a match for their daughter—but why it would be their concern was opaque to me. I assumed that the father and mother would join us in a foursome.