Welcome to Dystopia

by Gordon Van Gelder

  And I can join the militia.

  GLOW

  J.S. Breukelaar

  On the night of the elections I am with my cousin Ray and his human wife, Janyce. Footage flashes from the living room screen showing water-cannoned activists squirming on the asphalt, flayed detention survivors arcing across the crowds in heart-shaped orbitals singing Maria Callas arias. Jeering voters wave placards, saying “Lock ’em up!”

  My cousin and I are smashing shots, but we are drinking for different reasons. He is hailing presidential nominee Bud Towers as the Second Coming and I am trying to get drunk enough not to argue. Janyce has made her famous lobster burritos. My little sister would hate them.

  I lower my voice and say in our language, “You do realize that he’s been running on an anti-alien platform since day one?”

  “Hostile media shenanigans!” Ray cries out in reverberant English. The reflection from the swimming pool makes craters across the pale moons of his eyes.

  Even before his name was Ray—when we were still eking out survival deep in the bowels of our wounded world, before it spat us out to face the radioactive vomit of our bloated sun—what entranced him about earth were its shenanigans. Its youth, and light, but mostly its spirit, he said. Humanity so frail, and yet so consumed by the need to empower Another. So acquisitive, but yearning for dispossession, he enthused. So solitary, yet committed to the crowd. But I always wondered if my cousin’s attraction to Earth was because his name in our language is Uli, God of Jokes.

  From the kitchen you can hear Janyce saying, “Sugar. That’s the secret behind my coleslaw. A little bit of sugar, along with the salt, tenderizes the cabbage.”

  One of her daughters says, “You tell us that every time, Janyce.”

  Janyce says, “Call me ‘Mom,’ please. Just tonight?”

  I think my little sister would like Janyce’s daughters. She was the same age as the youngest when we arrived at the detention center. Fourteen. That was eight years ago.

  “Towers will make us great again!” Ray says.

  “Us?”

  He lowers his voice. “Speak English. You know how Janyce gets.”

  One of Janyce’s daughters is telling her sister about Oceanika, a new orbital space habitat with an ocean but fifteen miles above the earth, with beaches and sunsets and bars.

  Janyce comes in with sliced limes. “Lisa, you ever been to sea?”

  “The detention camp,” I say.

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  ICE keeps newly arrived aliens imprisoned on disused oil rigs in the Amundson Strait for a minimum of thirty-six lunar months for processing. Another week to get through the checkpoints after transfer—you need papers, a letter of acceptance from a halfway house or shelter, and they give you a new name. The immigration officer shoved a battered pink suitcase at us, made us empty our pouches at gunpoint. “For your own protection,” he said. “Anything found in an RBS’ll be confiscated.”

  He jammed the barrel of his rifle into my belly slit, parted the flaps. My eyes watered at the reek of cologne on his skin, sour coffee on his breath.

  Ray’s claws shook as he transferred our meager possessions from his pouch into the suitcase—the remainder of our cash, Grandcousin’s medals, and the diaphanous shroud that had been my sister’s skin. Amy sat quietly in her wheelchair beneath the Humanity First cap they made her wear, dwarfed in a greasy Bridge coat. The officer motioned for her to take it off but Ray gave him her medical papers, and they waved us through. I hated Ray at that moment, despised his fear of being turned away, of what might happen if he’d allowed Amy to sit there naked, show everyone what they made her. Instead, Ray’s bioluminescent markings just flashed a queasy green, which they mistook for a smile.

  “Welcome to New Liberty,” the officer said. “Have a nice day.”

  “If Towers gets elected,” I say, licking salt off my thumb, “The first thing he’ll do is round us all up and throw us back in detention. We’ll be deported.”

  The two most popular destinations floated by Bud Towers’ Humanity First party were JL45-J872, a small world in the Proxima Centauri Galaxy, and a disused refuse satellite that the Chinese had been trying to auction off for a decade.

  “Not us!” Ray shouts, very drunk. “The ones who get rounded up are criminals. Lowlife illegals.”

  Janyce’s oldest daughter pokes her head around the door. “So being in the wrong place at the wrong time makes them what? Dangerous?”

  The room spins. She sounds just like Amy.

  Over the eons belowground to escape the death throes of our sun, we evolved tough dorsal armor for protection against falling rocks, and phosphorescence to light our way. Somewhere between emerging to the inky permafrost that was all that was left of our world, and splashdown in the middle of the Amundsen Strait, my sister—when she still had her skin and before her name was Amy—asked what it meant to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. What it would make us.

  “Something that we don’t know about yet,” I said.

  Ray’s got an air rifle for the rare coyotes drawn to the oases of floodlit arroyo and potted yucca, but it’s mostly just rabbits he goes after. They always get away. He taps nervously on the table with his talons (Janyce makes him keep them short), and gets up to check the sliding door yet again. Except I know it’s not for the coyotes. ICE are never very far away, even in good neighborhoods like these. Amy worries when I visit Ray that I won’t be back, and when she worries, she bleeds. “Milu,” she messages, “I want to go home,” forgetting that I’m Lisa now and she is Amy, and we are home.

  Ray wrinkles his nose at a montage on the screen of Towers’ opponent in harsh gray scale. “He’ll have her behind bars with all those off-world terrorists she’s so keen to let in,” he slurs. “Then see how much she likes them.”

  Janyce refills the bowl of chips. “Did anyone else read how she used campaign funds to buy her maid a boob job?”

  I say, “Why would anyone buy their maid a boob job?”

  Unions between aliens and humans don’t produce live issue. We have other means of continuing our species. Janyce is Ray’s second wife in the five years we’ve been in New Liberty. She came with two teenage daughters and Ray works hard to pay for the nice secure house at the edge of the desert, plus Amy’s and my apartment, the medications. There isn’t any insurance for what she has.

  Janyce says: “I don’t love Towers. The things he says about women and…others. But look at all the riffraff coming in from who-knows-where. I just want my babies to be safe.”

  Her oldest puts the coleslaw on the table with an unconvincing eye roll. I’m drinking too much, soddenly seduced by this dream of warmth and family, until I think of Amy alone in the dark fighting a different fight. “Your dream, not mine,” she would say to Cousin Uli, way back when Earth was just a lucent sphere he’d paint over and over on the walls of our cave. I look at Janyce’s daughters, dressed in the latest fashions, hair and skin shiny and whole—a flash of light makes a jagged X across my heart.

  “Honest people,” Ray says, hooking a clawed thumb at his wife. “Just trying to get ahead.”

  Janyce’s youngest touches one of my phosphorescent markings. “That’s so cool.”

  Amy likes it when I glow, too. She watches from her chair, ghostly and seeping, and I dance for her, and in the dark in our high prison between earth and sky, I am a warrior once more, garlanded in light.

  Ray looks nervously toward the sliding doors to the yard.

  Even before surfacing, we got wind of the anthropocentric foment brewing on Earth. On the refugee ship we watched broadcasts of a retired Senator demanding genetic editing to remove off-world “mutations” like scales, pouches, and talons. Constitutional lawyers declared mixed marriages illegitimate at best, illegal at worst, due to being unconsummated in the lawful sense. Epidemiologists worried about cross-species contagion, but couldn’t say of what.

  Amy obsessed over the news, snuck off to meet with other scared angry
teenagers. “Youthful shenanigans,” Uli said, when I worried. Religious leaders declared our bioluminescence the real threat—no luciferin without Lucifer, they warned. ICE bosses said it was the dorsal armor that was the problem—I remember how Grandcousin disappeared for a few nights during a layover on the Wang Hun Orbital, came back after a bullet ricocheted off her striated hide, wounding a Humanity Firster in a poker game gone sour.

  Ray didn’t care. Amy—before she was Amy—tried to tell him Earth wasn’t what it once was, especially New Liberty. All that “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” stuff disappeared when arable land did, and from sea to shallow sea, she said, the only thing left was humanity’s desire to believe in something.

  I think now of my cousin’s luminous blue cave-paintings, and how they lit up his night.

  The apartment I share with Amy isn’t in a neighborhood as swank as this one. She doesn’t go out much because infection’s a risk and antibiotics are expensive. Mostly she stays in the dark, talking online with friends she’s never met—“freedom fighters,” she calls them—who send encrypted messages from beyond the stars. I work nights in a networks operations center to supplement Ray’s earnings, ride two hours in the subway to score Amy’s opiates from the black-market connect her “friends” hooked me up with.

  Once I asked Ray why his markings were so faded, and he swept an arm out to the neon-studded street, the heavens ablaze with Orbital worlds. “Why glow?” he said. “With all this light.”

  But I don’t think that’s true. I think the real reason he doesn’t glow is because Amy can’t. Atonement’s no joke—some fights never are.

  He passes a huge scaled hand over his forehead as if to wipe away a thought. Pours another round and says, “Remember sour milk?”

  The bored guards on the rig made us drink sour milk to see if it would get us drunk. Another time it was coffee dregs mixed in toilet water. We may not pass on our DNA the same as humans, but we share 98 percent of it with them. Tequila does just fine. I down the shot.

  Somewhere between the exercise yard and the detention center showers, my sister learned that RBS means both more and less than Random Body Search. When I went to visit her in the infirmary afterward, she said, “Being at the wrong place at the wrong time makes you nothing.”

  The screen erupts in cheers as another district falls to Towers. I wonder how hard it will be to get a taxi home. It’s Amy’s bath night. She needs me to get the temperature just right, not too hot, not too cold. I light scented candles so she can’t smell herself and when she gets out I scrub the tub clean so she can’t see the red ring she leaves behind.

  A siren wails up the canyon and floodlights arc over the house.

  Janyce says, “Maybe we should move.”

  “Where to?” the youngest calls from her bedroom, excitement in her voice.

  “Out of the desert.”

  The oldest laughs. “There’s no such thing as out of the desert.”

  Her phone tings and she goes into the hallway to take a call from her boyfriend. I think of offspring, of the dormant nucleotide sacs inside my pouch, hovering at the edge of life for a DNA shot they’ll never get, an Inceptor I’ll never get the chance to choose.

  From his campaign headquarters, a sweaty, gloating Bud Towers calls for unity.

  “See?” Ray says haltingly. “We’re all Terrans now.”

  “You don’t look like a Terran,” I point to the screen where, among the jubilant human mob, there is not a single alien.

  It’s nearly midnight. The crowds wave baseball hats like the one they make refugees wear on arrival—embroidered with the Humanity First mascot, a simplified interpretation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Shoals of hectic reflections from the pool swim across the walls and throw ragged shadows across my cousin’s face. I snake my hand into my pouch, feel for the telltale chip implanted in all of us on evacuation. To keep track, our homeworld activists said, to find us if we needed to be found. But Ray had his excised as soon as we were processed. No need, he said, only get us into trouble. We had the government of our adopted country to take care of us now.

  There is a high wall around the yard to keep out the coyotes, and I am halfway to my feet when a shape crawls over the edge. Heat rises in my chest and I point, wordless, at the door. I’ve had too much to drink.

  The lump along the top of the wall is joined by others. One by one they stand, silhouetted against the light-choked night, and one by one they drop into the yard.

  “Coyotes?” Ray swivels in his chair.

  I shake my head, neither standing nor sitting.

  “I’ll get my gun.” He lurches out of his chair with a scrape that makes Janyce’s eyes flick in alarm to the parquet finish.

  “Poor bunnies,” the youngest says.

  My legs shake uncontrollably. “No bunnies,” I say.

  It is ten minutes past midnight. The Western Rim is the last sector to fall to Towers. The backyard swarms with ICE operatives. They smash the door, spraying glass across the rug. The dark millennia burrowing in caves and tunnels has made us agile. I slither behind the oak sideboard stacked with Janyce’s family photographs and the girls’ soccer trophies.

  Ray returns from the bedroom with his air rifle. An ICE rookie, seeing nothing but an armored alien with a gun—lets off a panicked round.

  Janyce slumps into her lobster burrito.

  Ray screams. The operatives fall on him. His bands of light strobe a chromic green. “Save her, Milu!” he screams in our language. “Save her!” He is still screaming as they drag him away.

  The crowds cheer, ushering in the new era. When all I can hear below that is the girls’ sobbing, I come out. Janyce has slid off the chair and crawled onto the rug, leaving a smear of blood across the floor. I know what Ray wants but cross-species Re-Inception is unheard of—even among our own kind. The risks are high and in our subterranean cities it was punishable by expulsion—death. But I’m already expelled. I think back to the detention rig, how each time Amy would try and throw herself over the rails, or go after the guards with some instrument she smuggled from the infirmary, Ray would try and pull them off her. Until the last time when they outnumbered him seven to one—no hope with seven—but it cost him three months in solitary anyway.

  The daughters are crying and holding each other. Janyce hovers between life and death. There’s not much time.

  “Look for a pink suitcase,” I tell them. “Pack it with whatever you can’t leave behind. And hurry.”

  I turn Janyce over and wipe lobster off her face. Her blue eyes are glassy and her breath is shallow. I rip open her shirt, unfurl my tongue, and push it into the bullet hole. The tissue is custardy and her blood feels warm—I explore and suck until I come up against the hard, sharp flaps of the slug. Its edges tear at the fleshy muscular probe, and the luciferase in my tears mixes with the taste of tequila and human blood.

  The bullet drops to the floor in a mess of hot red tissue. I hunch over it, drooling. When Janyce wakes up among shadowy activists on some bare-bones cargo ship in deep space, she won’t remember much from her previous life, not even taking friendly fire on a Guatemalan rug, but maybe she’ll find a scar, a phosphorous wink from a home worth fighting for. Her brow begins to swell, the dermis around it already hardening into thick plates.

  I rummage in my pouch to activate the tracking chip, message our retrieval coordinates and estimated arrival time—but I’ll be gone by then and I hope they understand. That I’ve gone back to Amy. How my fight, whatever’s left of it, is here and for her.

  The sisters rush back from the bedroom clutching the battered pink suitcase, and pull up short as their mother’s French polished fingernails extend into coffee-colored claws. I motion for them to be still. They watch Janyce’s eyes flutter open, pale as the moon.

  “Will she know who we are?” the youngest asks.

  “Will she always be our mom?” the oldest asks.

  I tell them yeah. Just like my sister, even after the guards
took away her skin, will always be my sister.

  PRECAUTION AT PENN STATION

  Michael Kandel

  They showed their badges, pulled me out of line to the turnstile, drew me off to the side on the platform, and pumped me full of lead. “A security measure,” they explained over the bang bang. “Random executions to keep the terrorists off balance. We know you’re probably just another commuter going to work, sir, but we have to show the Muslim extremists we mean business. Any sign of vacillation only makes them more vicious.”

  “It’s random,” they went on as I was expiring in the pool of my blood, “because we don’t want to be accused of racial profiling. Just last week we terminated a sweet Irish grandmother who was coming back from Macy’s, from a sale on Italian leather handbags. She didn’t object. ‘I understand it’s for the Homeland, dears,’ she said before she gave up the ghost.”

  “Racial profiling,” they went on, leaning over me as the death rattle filled my throat, “undermines the American way, everything that this great country stands for. We shouldn’t have used the word ‘Muslim’ a moment ago, we regret that, sir, because those fanatic fundamentalists are no more Muslim, truly, than you or I.”

  “Islam,” they went on after my heart stopped and my eyes glazed and froze, “is a religion not that different, we understand, from Christianity or Judaism. Though you have to wonder about all the violence in its history. Did you know, sir, that the words assassin and thug are Arabic?”

  NEWSLETTER

  Jennifer Marie Brissett

  Dear Loyal Patrons,

  Usually in this newsletter I would be telling you about the latest event we were planning or the next author who would be reading with us. I would list the books that sold the best this month or an upcoming title that we recommend that you read, and sometimes a tale of the latest antics of our store kitty. But today I want to talk you about something else. Something that I technically am not supposed to talk about but I feel as the owner of this community bookstore I should share with you.