Anti-Im! Anti-Im! Day One, a modern parable

By C.N. Bean

Anti-Im! Anti-Im! Day One, revives an ancient art form, the parable, to weave a modern mystery in four parts. At the heart of the mystery that unites artificial intelligence, genetic warfare and genocide into an entirely plausible context is 15-year-old Nicole Dee Showalter, a biracial girl from a small southern town, a nobody until she becomes the active carrier of a contagious disease that modifies the human genome. She is now on trial for a capital crime she allegedly committed when she was a teen. Four years beyond 15, she is in her 40s, aging quickly from her infection and fighting not just for her life but for the lives of countless humans who carry the latent germ she circulated. The parable is full of dark moments and sayings told in a well-lit courtroom. Welcome to Day One of that four-day confession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.N. Bean
• Release date: Dec 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463406717

C.N. Bean

C.N. Bean writes novels, screenplays, poetry, short fiction and non-fiction. His novels include Putnam/Penguin’s A Soul to Take, Dust to Dust and With Evil Intent. He directs and produces films. His most recent film, Poem to a Nameless Slave, premiered in numerous prestigious film festivals. His screenplay, The Dream Interpreter, became Virginia Tech’s first public film and went on to the Cannes Film Festival. His screenplays have won various awards. His poetry has appeared widely and one of his poems, “Parable of the Sewer,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Anti-Im! Anti-Im! returns an ancient genre, the parable, to the contemporary world and shares it in four parts.

Book preview

Anti-Im! Anti-Im!

DAY ONE

a modern parable by

c.n. bean

Copyright © 2018 by C.N. Bean. All Rights Reserved.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination, interpretations of commonly known historical events, or used in a fictitious manner.

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ISBN: 9780463406717

…draw near and I will open my mouth in a parable.

Psalm

…coming in the clouds with great power….

Daniel

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

About the Author

Chapter One

At the end of each day of my four day closing statement, the Anti-Im guards escorted me back to my cell, made me change into my bright-orange prison jumpsuit, all but my shoulder-length cherry-red gloves, which I was required to wear 24-hours-a-day (no, there was no washing, bathing or showering), and delivered a typed transcript of my confession for that day. A trustee in a white uniform slid an aluminum tray of food through a slot in the bottom of the cell door. While I ate, I studied my words from that day and wrote notes in the margins of the transcript. Never once did I think, though, that I would win. I saw the death sentence as the only outcome for a black woman who had made a huge mistake when she was 15 and eluded authorities for what seemed more than a lifetime.

I stood trial during the Anti-Im Feast of Purim, or lots, which boiled down to a game of chance or a toss of the dice, and I had never been lucky. Apparently one of the Five Gold Mice had been in their Artificial Intelligence experiments, though, and had unlocked the curse of the Five Gold Tumors. I was that mouse caught in a trap at the top of the food chain and the survival of humankind depended on what I had to say to my jury. The problem was I had no defense other than my own ramblings and my belief that I had talked my way out of about every problem in life. As for the Anti-Im guards who escorted me to and from the courtroom. I wouldn’t call them robots because they were almost indistinguishable from humans. I say ‘almost’ because they were more perfect than us in every way, or at least acted that way. They were like television and movie stars that made you, less privileged, wish you lived in their fantasy world.

In the courtroom, I wore a long-sleeved, floor-length pine-green frock and, of course, my cherry- red gloves, the symbol I was on trial in a capital offense. The old courthouse where the trial took place was in the center of the small, now deserted town of Appomattox, Virginia, where the Civil War had come to an end. Despite its presence in a ghost town, the courtroom had old wood furnishings that were clean and polished and looked beautiful, despite their age. Old ceiling fans turned slowly in the cathedral ceilings. All the windows were open because it was a hot day, though the Anti-Ims showed no signs of the heat’s toll on their perfect bodies that were dressed in bright-red, white and black uniforms with the customary patch of the Five Gold Mice and Five Gold Tumors arranged in a medical caduceus on their left sleeves. The center staff of the gold caduceus was topped with gold wings. The five mice, each smaller than the one above it, were trapped by two entwined serpents. At the base of the staff were the five tumors, as if a rock pile to hold the staff upright.

I sat until told to address the jury. Each time my closing statement started, somewhere beyond the windows, speakers began to chant, Anti-Im! Anti-Im! Anti-Im…. I knew it was propaganda to discourage me. In the tiny pauses between the chants, I could hear birds chirp. The two choruses seemed impossibly at odds with each other.

Each day the court clerk began the session by saying, All rise!

We stood until a deep-female voice permeated the room, seeming to come from everywhere at once, and told us, Be seated. With that she added, The defendant may approach the jury and make her statement. She always made sure I understood the conditions of my statement by telling me, Never look in my direction unless I give you permission.

I had always hated to be told what to do or not to do. Perhaps that was my problem. Or maybe it was deeper than that. I had once met someone who trained service dogs and their owners. He talked about ‘negative disobedience’ and how if the service dog ever stepped in the way of the master, the master was to respect the negative disobedience of the dog. The dog might be saying something like ‘You’re about to get hit by a car.’" I had often wanted to blame my problems in life as negative disobedience, as if I could see better than the person who pretended to see everything. I had been called stubborn, among other things, but the bottom line was I didn’t like to be told what to do or not to do by someone I sensed had flawed vision.

At first during my closing statement, I wasn’t even sure where she was because her voice came from everywhere, and I was afraid to look around. I assumed she remained at the front of the courtroom and followed her instructions not to look in that direction. On the first day, I left my chair at the defendant’s table and approached the tiered stage of twelve Anti-Ims, to whom I said, "Ladies and Gentlemen Anti-Ims of the jury, I’ve had a lot of time to look back, as if a few short years between 15 and 40 is the same as what should have been 25 years. I’ve considered all the technology I grew up with—GPS, self-driving cars, drones, cameras at intersections throughout cities and along interstates and on top of security fences, enough clouds of storage to generate a virtual Ice Age for anything non-digital, laptops, Macs, I-pads, tablets, desktops, digital work stations, cell phones, apps, wearable technology, smart EVERYTHING, streaming, microprocessors, Internet, Wi-Fi and, yes, artificial intelligence—and how 95% of the world’s population was connected at the time of our downfall, or close enough to someone connected to be considered connected. Was I, the 15-year-old Nicole Dee Showalter surprised by the rise of the Anti-Ims when you suddenly came along? After the initial shock, no. As the ‘bomb’ was after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so were the Anti-Ims, a genetically cleansed nuclear family of pure-lineage flesh crossbred with technology. I guess I had always known it was just a matter of time before someone super-human came out of a rogue laboratory.

"What did catch me off guard was my inheritance of a disease I had never heard of before, the progeria, or aging virus, you infected me with. What shocked me even more was how you planned for me to spread the virus in its dormant form until you found an opportune moment to activate it—that is, until I violated a cardinal law that messed up your plan—I sampled a small taste of the Anti-Im food that was forbidden to all but the otherwise aged, sick and debilitated of humankind. It transformed me from 15 to 40 in a few short years. Now, having been captured, I am on trial for that crime, which you call a capital offense, and will not only be sentenced to death if I lose my case, but my loss will bring about the activation of the disease in all other infected humans, which has enormous global implications.

"Of course, if I win, you will halt the progress of my own disease, though I have already been told that what has happened up to now cannot be reversed, and I will receive the formula for the progeria vaccine, which will save everyone who carries the dormant virus or has the potential to become infected. With those understandings, I begin my closing statement.

I stand before you accused of being the original sinner in your system, of knowingly breaking your fundamental Original Sin law. I kept eye-contact on the jury members because it would have been impossible not to when I stood so close to the jury box. The Anti-Ims in their red,white and black uniforms were bigger than life and mesmerizing. They drew you to their perfect bodies in a way that reminded you of your own imperfections and made you wonder how a state-of-the-art computer could finally have elevated to the status of a human brain. I was scared and had not a clue how I was going to save myself from a verdict I was certain was fixed. All I knew was that I had always been fascinated with challenging circumstances, what I called games, and I had to play these circumstances like a game whose win was life and whose loss was death. I said, "When I was growing up as a young black girl who had been placed with my white grandparents because my white mother was in prison and my black father had moved on without me, I had heard something called Original Sin preached in a local Baptist church and on more than one occasion thought I might be a victim of original sin because trouble seemed to follow me everywhere I went in life. I brought constant disappointment and frustration to everyone around me. Maybe I also felt the presence of original sin in me because I was the only black person in our Baptist church in a small town in southwest Virginia, where blacks were few and far between anyway. For whatever the reason, I remember spending hours restricted to my room, not because my grandfather or grandfather sent me there, but because their son and