X-Novo

By Ken Hagdal

"20#6 AD. Following the discovery of the genuine Dead Sea Scrolls, women get to learn it’s a tampered-with version of the Old Testament which was used to keep their foremothers in submission for nearly two millennia. Hilarity fails to ensue.

After a first, scorned, attempt at enforcing the female-friendly newfound teachings, the not-so-weaker gender ends up revolting and snatching the reins of the US administration from the callous hands of Patriarchy. Two novelties will be born out of their reforms towards a healthy and peaceful society: the Collar, an electronic device for suppressing violent impulses in men, and the Pool, the State-run dating service for women.

The first Anniversary of the Revolution is now only a few days away. As the head of the Department of Information, Lisa Fenrich is all too aware of the stakes for her government. What she’s about to discover is that the holes she’s been plugging were trifles compared to the one about to open under her feet.

Disgraced yet unbowed, she will set out on a quest to recover the last secret fragment of the Holy Scriptures. One that would spell the end of the age-old rift between men and women if revealed to the world, but that the Presidentess she so staunchly supports intends to tweak around for her political survival; and maybe more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Hagdal
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9782954616520

Ken Hagdal

Ken Hagdal was trained as a control engineer, worked as a programmer and moved on to artsy endeavors and non-academic psychology research, with a focus on coercive persuasion and its manifestations in every area of life. He’s very familiar with victims of abuse in all its forms (sexual, emotional, physical); an experience gained from running a support group on late msn groups, RL involvement and observation, forum moderation, and long-term immersion in fringe groups.Past Writings: Screenplays, including a dark comedy finalist in the 13th edition of the Write Movies contest.Interests: History, Mythology, Sciences, Psychology, Music, Writing, Web Development, Runes, Nutrition, Paranormal, Dream Interpretation, Gender Issues, Woods, UFO’s, Gaming.Favorite books: Death on Credit, Journey to the End of the Night, Ham of Rye, Catch 22, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Elder Eddas, The History of Rome, Nationalism and Culture, The Ego and its Own, Brave New World, 1984, We, Beyond Good and Evil, Fahrenheit 451, Malleus Maleficarum, Psychology and Alchemy, Psychology of Women – A Handbook of Issues and Theories

Book preview

X-Novo

Ken Hagdal

Copyright © 2014 Ken Hagdal

Published by Ken Hagdal at Smashwords

All rights reserved.

Covert Art by Natasha Gianni

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text of the Tables of the Gender Laws borrowed from Deborah Tannen’s Genderlect Styles

ISBN-13: 978-2-9546165-2-0-6

To my partner in crime, for her undyne support, grit, and overall spark.

And profuse thanks to Snake, Mollie, Janice, Tom, Linda and Karen for their thoughtful feedback on the successive incarnations of the draft.

CONTENTS

Note

Day One – The Politics of Ecstasy

Day Two – Harvest

Day Three – Fit to be Tied

Day Four – Marrow of the Spirit

Day Five – The Devil you Know

Day Six – Handle with Care

Day Seven – Recreation Day

Day Eight – The House of Atreus

Day Nine – A Twist in the Myth

Day Ten – Isa

Day Eleven – Live... in the Raw

Day Twelve – Light II Truth

Day Thirteen – The Threnody of Triumph

Day Fourteen – Caravan Beyond Redemption

Day Fifteen – Horror Show

"Behold the new messiah, arising from the wound

In rags of execution, freedom is consumed"

Virgin Steele – Life Among the Ruins

"Until the dawn lifts, only stare into the darkness

The days will blur. The darkest days, days will seem so clear"

Paradise Lost – To the Darkness

To Whomever is Reading This,

For some reason, Goddess, in her mysterious ways, has enabled you to unearth my journal from the soil of this sun-battered desert. Hopefully, it will allow you, or one of your thought leaders, to draw a moral from the events it recounts. There has to be one. There always is when one flips through the darkest pages of Humankind’s history. I would just be at a loss to tell you what ours was. Too involved, and still too fresh, I guess.

The seminal idea for these pages came to me when working on the speech for our Revolution’s first anniversary. Back then, some of our sisters were going down the slippery slope and I thought it would help re-ground them if I addressed you, one of our remote descendants; an audience who may have forgotten the reason for our struggle or wasn’t feeling directly concerned by it. An audience who, until recently, was assumed to be female. If this isn’t the case, I can understand that you may find my standpoint occasionally disturbing, but should you take it in stride, I also want to believe you could benefit from some of my insights into your gender’s quirks here and there.

The other possible ground for reproach is having chosen the form of a personal journal, to have aggregated to objective, historical, facts all my thoughts and comments, as well as personal events, and so, in the most ingenuous manner. In response to these misgivings, I would like to ask: what priceless data would we have gained from a probe inside Hitler’s mind as he was waiting on a reply from the Vienna Arts Academy, or Napoleon’s as he was sitting beneath a chestnut tree on his twentieth birthday, watching French troops crush his people’s will into submission? Wouldn’t we now have an inkling of what laid the groundwork for mass bloodshed?

Of course, our endgame caused far fewer casualties as you must know. What I’m alluding to is this failure to break the cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations. The eeriest part is some of history’s pundits had brought us an acute knowledge of the symptoms, especially the likes of Machiavelli and Gibbons.

Maybe that was it… We might have been distracted by the glare on the surface and missed some dark ooze festering deep within; the roots of it all. Something we might even have nurtured through our good intentions… Someone should dig that out.

Lisa Fenrich,

Secretary of Information of the USA (07/20#9 – 08/15/20#0)

Disclaimer: Years, decades, or centuries after the events, you might have heard about me in official history in a non-flattering manner. In my defense, I want to bring to your attention that the purpose of mass media in my time, which I suppose to be your historians’ main source, wasn’t exactly to offer the most accurate information. I know; I had been in charge of them long enough. But then again, there might be certain patterns I might not want to see, unconsciously. I will leave you free to form your own opinion. My only request is that you do so after acquainting yourself with my own version to its full extent. As to the truthfulness of my account, all I can point out is it was written for neither a prince nor an honorary title. For all I know, it may never be more than a speech to maggots…

Day One

The Politics of Ecstasy

Mina skimmed the printout.

You did a really good job, Lisa, she finally remarked.

I couldn’t help peeking at the twirling pages from my side of her desk. Pink highlight was for a nod. Blue, for a frown… So far, so pink.

That was a very sound approach; creative, too, she continued. It reminds us of all the fundamentals without coming off preachy.

There was a slight mismatch in her tone. Something that pervaded her gestures. An air of mechanism, of detachment. And from yet deeper, its root strained the lines the years had etched around her eyes. Glossless, they remained riveted on the speech, as if loaded with a weight too heavy to bear.

Behind her, hanging on the wall with majestic dignity, Big Sister was looking after us. The artist rendition of her at any rate, since unfortunately we had found no photograph that depicted her in a fashion worthy of her sanctity. In this picture, duplicated in every office of the Complex, she was clad in typical nun habit, with that skin-tight white coif which imprisoned her neck and all of her head except the face under a black, hood-like, veil. She had always refused to give it up; as a reminder of the old system’s yoke.

Her head tilted gently to one side, one end of the dog leash in a tender embrace around her neck and the other tied around her wardrobe’s rail. Just how her body was found. The Sacred Scrolls she had discovered were firmly gripped in her left hand while the right one dangled, palm wide open, like an invitation to commune. Her face looked so young and peaceful despite her sixty-two springs, as though her newborn faith had rejuvenated her.

It was tough looking straight at her in these moments. I knew the rough edges of the speech would be smoothed out, it’s why I was here, but part of me still felt nervous for not getting it right on first draft. Because we knew I did.

Pages stopped flipping. Mina’s eyes descended on a paragraph circled with a pink stroke.

Just out of curiosity, when you said,...

She leaned on her elbows and read in a steady monotone: Back in men’s day, you would open a newspaper and had to go through pages and pages on finance, the economy, sports results, weather forecast, and celebrity gossip before you could at last spot the thumbnail about one of them arrested for raping and murdering one of our sisters. The most popular means of disposing of her were: strangling, throat cutting, skull smashing with a stone, or mere fist for the self-indulgent, before burying her in a trash bag or charred with gasoline... Two pages before that, you could read a journalist bawling his heart out across four columns over one of their champions spraining his ankle.

She looked up.

It was idiomatic or an actual case?

Yes, it was. I mean, it did happen.

She stared at me, or to me, a moment and nodded.

Another thing,...

She turned two pages. There was the blue stain.

Why did you feel the need for…

She read: Not all men were like that, though. Some of them respected us. There were even a few you could have an intellectually-stimulating conversation with every now and then.

She looked up, waited.

Well, I’ve noticed that coming across as objective can have a jolting effect on the person you’re trying to convince.

She hummed lengthily, glanced at her speech.

Lisa, under different circumstances, I would have commended your commitment to the truth... but at the present time, I’m extremely concerned about any level of granularity below self-imposing trends.

Alright. Delete it.

But, you understand, right? There’s nothing wrong with it as it is. I just wouldn’t like for our stray sisters to grasp at anything that might further confuse them… The rest was honestly a joy to read.

I’m fine.

She offered a conventional smile, reached for her companion whiteout bottle and unscrewed its cap with carefree abandon. The squeak of the dried fluid sent a shiver up and down my spine.

I looked away.

I’m going to get going if I’m no longer needed.

Hold on, she curtly ordered as the tip of the brush finished its job.

The cap put away, she picked up her phone, dialed an unfamiliar tune.

Can we drop in now? she asked.

Thanking whoever was on the other end, she hung up and rose from her chair.

Come along, she said.

*******

Mina’s signature pace was brisk, commandeering, announced far and wide down the endless hallway by the metronomic battering of our heels on the glossy white tiling.

I always enjoyed stringing along with her. It made me feel like a snug remora sticking to the belly of its shark. Her mere vibes sufficed to keep the stinkers at bay, to have them duck out to the closest open office or chafe their sleeves off against the walls, their eyes plowing the floor. Once in a while, she would clobber one of those unfortunate or careless enough to walk past us with some urgent assignment or reprimand for an overdue email, sometimes fictitious; to remind the others. She wasn’t keen on unauthorized ears picking up bits of our whispered chatter. This time, though, she remained dead silent. Her trailing aura was drab and smothering. It had been since the beginning of the Anniversary preparations.

*******

Our first stop was at the entrance to Research. The Department had been situated on our last floor, to the north of the ring formed by the Complex, whereas Mina and our Oval Office ruled the south; Homeland Security, the west; and Defense, the east. Its border was marked by a laconic Restricted Access sign on one of the twin security doors. Those who had made it that far had at least a suspicion of what lay behind.

Mina dialed the door open. She cast me a throat-tightening glance, like she needed to, and once again led the way, past offices, and then data centers and labs supplied with state-of-the-art electronic equipment.

The sisters there appeared rather wary of the intrusion yet benevolent enough. Some were donning civilian clothing, more of them, lab coats. Mina traded flash greetings with the latter.

We kept up the pace far into the section and took a left turn up to a shallow recess where lurked a narrow, single-doored elevator. A brown translucent square was mounted on its frame in place of a call button.

Mina hacked it with a badge.

I squeezed myself into the car first so she could operate. She followed and pressed for the lower of the two floors available like a regular.

The car closed on us in an unsettling silence.

Down through the floors we sank.

*******

The shaft took us down to an antechamber big as a small studio apartment. The walls, floor and ceiling sported a gray paint that glistened in a wet-like sheen under the light of a neon tube; the type used in basements.

Across from the elevator, a door was guarded by a sister in a military uniform. She duly saluted us as I followed Mina in.

The place looked like a control center of some kind. Along the wall to the left, two headset-equipped sisters were keeping a watchful eye on their assigned monitor. The one closer to the exit displayed numerous real-time figures and graphs, two of which were akin to heart/brain signals. Its neighbor was filled with a three by three set of streams from indoor cameras.

A sister clad in a white lab coat was waiting for us by the second technician; my guess was late forties. She wore her medium blonde hair disheveled without a hint of contrition, as can commonly be seen among science-inclined folks.

Lisa, this is Sister Nelly, head of the Collar Department. She’s running the last series of tests on the new prototype... I thought you would be interested, Mina teased with a smirk.

Taking the cue, the lady in white dropped the green light to her staff.

On the wall behind her, a crimson red curtain parted off a projection screen which pictured the medium shot of a young dark-haired woman with short curls. She was facing a door with her hand on the handle, motionless, as if in deep concentration…

The technician in charge of the cameras relayed the order to her through her headset mic.

The screen switched to a living-room scene. At its center, a male specimen of about the same age was sitting on a two-seater, leaning over an electric fan and tinkering with its rotor, the guard in his lap.

We heard the sister burst in. Her footsteps stopped off-camera, soon to be replaced by heavy foot-tapping.

Gonna take all day fixing it?! I’m stewing in here! she lashed out.

Yeah, who knocked it off the table? I forgot, the man hit back.

The camera zoomed in further on the man until the screen framed his entire face. Strangest thing, he was gnashing his teeth despite his collar.

I looked at Mina in disbelief.

She nodded back to the screen smiling.

What followed were several minutes of a genuine argument that concluded with the man blue in the face, his vocal chords near the point of rupture. The sister stormed off in tears, smashing, for the record, a ceramic pottery placed as if by providence on a phone table by a straight line to the door.

The screen turned black.

What do you think? Mina asked, falsely casual.

Well, unless the collar was deactivated, which I’d doubt,... that would mean we found a way to allow men to argue.

And when we want it, the scientistess added.

She went on about how challenging it had been to disable punishment when necessary without manual input. I let her have her two minutes of limelight, smiling and nodding on and off while contemplating the groundbreaking implications of Collar 2.0.

Politically, it provided the perfect opportunity to drive our stray sisters back to the camp of Reason. Both those who claimed the collar had deprived Man of his freewill, and those who missed,… hmm,… part of what used to make men male. Not saying it was exactly what they hoped for but it was definitely a step in the right direction. Plus, it showed we cared about their feelings.

On a personal level, just wow... No more fretting about our significant other accidentally tasing himself. And of course, there was sex. Goodness, the mere thought of that cranky dude on the screen...

Hello, Lisa?

She and the scientistess were looking at me with amused expressions.

Sorry. I was thinking of what it all entails. Can’t wait to start working on my next op-ed.

That’s not going to be possible, I’m afraid.

Why?!

"It must remain top secret until it has been mass-produced. Last thing we want on Earth is to cause our sisters to patiently wait for it."

*******

We got out of the compound in a silence unlike the kind on the way in. It would have been hard for anyone in my position not to feel slighted for having been kept out of the loop so long. Maybe she didn’t want to feed me false hopes. Or, maybe it had to do with rules and regulations regarding classified projects. I’m not sure… At any rate, it was only fair that I turn down her offer to stop at her office. There was no mystery she pined to discuss our new options with her unofficial partner in crime. Oh well, maybe another time I guessed, when I felt ready too.

With the afternoon drawing to an end, I retreated to my own quarters for a last tour of inspection before calling it a day. I began with the AP office for a look at the latest news feeds and followed up with a visit to the editorial room of the Women Post, our federal newspaper. The visit was more for the sake of taking some lingering filth off my mind than getting work done since everything was well on its way up to the next-morning news.

The gradual emptying of the Department always felt a little unsettling after the flurry of activity of the afternoon, but I always made sure not to hold them too long. Some of them had their hubbies or boyfriends eager to show off all they had cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, ironed and Goddess knew what other treats they had been busying themselves with over the day. I was so happy for them, really. They all deserved it. Well, minus one or two, like everywhere.

I headed back to my office to indulge myself in some good ol’ Tetris or junk mail until I would make up my mind to pack up. Mina popped in shortly afterwards on her way out for one "very last" change on her speech... She assured me it could wait, though, and suggested I go home with a pitying sort of look. I shooed her off on account of an important call that was about to come in any second.

I so hated it when people tried to talk me into clocking out. I actually loved the feel of my hive in the evening. It was the quietest time of the day, just before night shift. One of those rare moments when I could sit back and contemplate the long way we had come since I took over.

On a fair note, I was cruising along an editorial line that had been largely inspired by my predecessors. It was its second version, actually. The short-lived former incarnation was an attempt to harken back to the Age of Enlightenment when those in charge linked the average citizen’s happiness with a rise in their cultural level. We tried to revive the spirit by dealing mainly with topics with far reaching implications, in a strictly analytical and prospective manner. The switch was carried out almost instantly. That’s one of the upsides of having such a pull over the news industry, whether through public networks or a tacit understanding with private ones that uncanny regulations can be a lot of fun to produce.

The new regimen lasted a couple of weeks, until reception of an alarmist missive co-signed by the reps of ten major US corporations informing us that, while they did approve of our effort to create a happier society, they greatly fear(ed) our new approach might unintentionally backfire. They concluded with a request for an off-record meeting where they would bring us up to speed on the keystone to the old System: the what, not why policy. This is the substance of the lecture we were treated to...

Based on their several decades of expertise in mass communication, they had concluded that what people wanted more than anything was to feel good, especially about themselves. This is good for them because when people feel good, they buy a lot of things. And this is also good for us because it sucks the sap out of populism.

So, in the absolute, they weren’t against our attempt to make people brighter. After all, everyone feels good thinking they’re smart. The problem was that in the long run knowledge rarely keeps people happy because they’re bound to turn up some ugly truth, especially if it has to do with contributing to someone else’s misery. When that happens, they don’t feel good about themselves at all, research found. This particular point was the crux of the problem, because in our budding age of transnationalism, it was unfortunately not possible to make everyone on Earth equally content, since we still had to grapple with slews of cultural groups that didn’t necessarily share the same expectations... It was, however, possible to keep the world going round thanks to their surefire technique; if we would be so kind as to re-instate it.

He closed his sales pitch by demonstrating the blunt efficiency of it through a practical illustration. It started with a brief rundown on socio-economics, which was pretty insightful in itself.

Over the last century, he explained, we made our citizens feel good by making their lives easier. The downside is they came to think there are a lot of jobs they won’t put up with anymore for the kind of money companies are willing to dole out. Fortunately, we could count on (wo)manpower from abroad. He insisted it was essential to understand it came in two equally important varieties.

The first, the sturdy ones, would be willing to do any of those tough jobs for peanuts a day. The second, the smarty ones, let our government secure highly-qualified workers that would cost millions of dollars a head if trained locally. It was also good for them because if these workers stayed in their native country, they would be the ones who would contribute to building up a real economy. One that wouldn’t survive the global depression it was bound to beget.

The roads to hell are paved with good intentions, he reminded us.

That was getting a little abstract so we cut him short to ask how we were supposed to make use of this in the news. He said it was actually pretty easy.

First of all, he recommended we keep spurring interest in other cultures because a) it keeps people from worrying too much about domestic issues, and b) it will subliminally plant the notion that there’s something incomplete to us. The tricky part was how to cover conflicts and destitution in developing countries without our av-cits connecting the dots with the brain drain.

By all means, he stressed, we were not to downplay or ignore the crises. However counter-intuitive, it was important to report them to our heart’s content. Have the victims testify. Sound off the death toll. Bring in friends and family for an emotional context. Let them know the world cared and was working hard to put an end to the situation. If done right, the empathic overload would hold up long after something more topical had cropped up.

What, not why, he reiterated to an audience with too many fingers too deep in the pie for comfort… Little did I know that less than a month later, these gems of wisdom would prove priceless in the management of our first major, and potentially explosive, case of collar glitch.

I pulled open the drawer where I stored my press clippings and laid back in my chair. I could have flipped straight to the page with my eyes closed... July 13th, Man meets tragic death in parking lot in queen size letters. Beneath: an ID photograph of the hapless departed one. Even the font’s serif looked like the letters were screaming bloody murder. Ironically, the article had nearly cost me my position.

Thing is, this was our first lethal case and the news of it was bound to break, at least by word of mouth. So against my boss’ orders, I took it upon myself to report the death using the what, not why paradigm the wise men had taught us, though not without some concern at how it would be received. That, I found out soon enough.

The following morning, I had barely dropped my purse in my office when Mina thundered from the doorway that I was expected in the meeting room.

The execution squad, namely she, my boss, Kate and an unknown graying sister, were sitting enthroned on one side of the conference table. Mina pointed me to the lonely chair right across from hers. I sat down at my assigned seat with all crosshairs locked in on me.

Mina fiddled with a copy of the eve’s paper lying before her, eyes cast down. The others remained impassive. She sighed heavily… The shredding started off: a startling surprise, coming from (me), grossly irresponsible, a complete disregard of the order issued by my hierarchy. She was soon aided and abetted by her bloodhounds whipped into a frenzy by the sight of my exposed heart being bled dry.

Their verdict was not appealable. My actions had dealt an incalculable blow to our administration and all they could now do was brace for the impeding firestorm. I ended up leaving in a fit before being officially disposed of.

I then hastily cleared out my desk, computer included, and headed straight back home where I spent the rest of the day stricken with grief on my couch, amidst heaps of tissues cropping up about like puffballs after a September rain. I don’t even remember what time I passed out.

The phone woke me up the next morning. I figured who it was. Didn’t need to be a psychic… I let her hang on a moment while I cobbled together a couple of ways to say bye properly, depending on how irrational she still might be. Seemed like the dignified way to handle it.

I got one thing right. It was Mina. Only, it hit me right off something was afoot at her soppy inquiry about how I was doing. She then apologized for the turn of events, justifying it with an elliptic we got worried sick.

I got her to spit it out: over the past hours, they had been flooded with tear-soaked mails and phone calls expressing their sympathies for the deceased... The dazing catharsis predicted by my theory had made everyone accept his death as the result of an unfortunate concourse of circumstances: exceptional heat wave, wife delayed at the register – it was Summer sales – and a/c draining out their car battery, while our technical experts clearly stated the collar hadn’t met its heat resilience specs. Hence the man being knocked out by a month’s worth of sedative and left to fry in his car.

Mina implored that I forgive the infamous meeting. Sensing sincere regret, I tactically offered her my explanation for her inadvertent misjudgment: she had been unconsciously influenced by her close circle; most of whom were members of the old guard, reactionary sisters clinging on to outdated dogmas which had kept them from embracing common sense because my solution had been remotely man-inspired. What she needed instead of this hindrance was analytical, adaptive, quick-witted, and pragmatic fresh blood, whoever she may deem worthy of these qualities, if she didn’t want to jeopardize our revolution. Of course, the restructuring should be implemented gradually. The word purge never made anyone feel good. She liked the sound of it all a lot. And thus began the steady cow-tipping game that had traced my way to the top. But this would be for yet another entry...

I closed the press-book on the picture of the dead man with a strange sense of craving and mentally took note to buy some barbecue meat at the mart on the way back home. It had been a long time since my last. They used to be John’s private preserve… Sigh.

Checked my emails one last time.

I almost wished I hadn’t after stumbling across one that brought me to tears. Something absolutely heart-breaking about a sweetheart born with her wrists and ankles all fused together. The very least I could do was to forward the message to at least ten of my friends to help fund the surgery that would bring Mary her smile back.

Good deed done, I finally logged off and put Mina’s copy of her speech in my laptop case; nearly forgot about it.

Slapped my Do not touch/move, please note on top of my folder stack for the janitor.

Zipped my computer up.

That’s