The Patroit (tentative)

THE PATRIOT, A beginning:

The weather was balmy and he cherished that in a subconscious way, even though he was in a foul mood. Such moods were fortunately the norm; he required their scathing honesty to continue in his capacity as Artistic Director at Patriot Robotics. He was the mind that birthed SD-9000, the most popular humanoid-cross that PR had come up with in their illustrious and pervasive three-decade power trip. That robot had been something of a sensual exercise for him. And that was a rarity, considering his brutal and sex-diseased past. But he didn’t look at it like that. He remembered fondly the night that its image had interrupted one of his nocturnal simbar jaunts.

He was full into it on that blustery evening. The city had evolved around him until then, that’s what he had kept telling himself as he made his way to Lola’s. Thoughts like that punctuated his sourness and made things clear: he was chosen to be perfect, therefore anything he chose to do was indeed perfect as a result. Even if that meant visiting simbars and sitting in the shadows. The shadows were easy to lurk in when you visited the simbars of Jeffersonville. In a way, the city had evolved around him, but that wasn’t saying much, and it definitely wasn’t saying that he was individually responsible for anything. That would have been a death sentence, no matter how you looked at it. Because Jeffersonville, and all the other colonies across the New Continent, although steeped in the Republican Ideologies of Faith, Freedom and Force, had sank into disrepair. They were seeds of distaste and untouched expansion. Take any bad man, put him with others of that ilk, and people cannot work together. However – and this was the trick – if you took bad men and told them they were good, only a few of them didn’t work out and they were killed off as quickly as possible; examples of what happened when distaste and untouched expansion were made to run unchecked.

Just such a display was being shown the night he saw SD-9000. Crossing White Avenue he had come across one of the Moral Decency Department’s dramatic designs placed stubbornly in the boulevard. Several of its members, with their jaunty little caps and flowing capes, were putting the finishing touches on its writhing subject. Here, the nameplate declared, was Jonathan Morgan, a solicitor of fleshly delights. And that, no matter how you looked at it, was a death sentence. He had been strung up in a monstrous metaphor of the crimes he had committed, the MDD made sure of that. His hands were bound and he was hanging in front of a plasma screen that screamed with images of disease and death and tragedy: the inevitable results of fleshly consummations. He had been castrated, that much was clear. There was a bright white tunic drawn tight around his midsection and tied between his legs. Blood was coagulating on its surface, marring it and dripping onto the plastic ground cover beneath him. His blood was collected by a vacuum and processed in a tube that ran up over his head. From there, it dripped down, landing wrecklessly where it might on his body. His arms looked like they had dislocated sometime in the recent past. He was on the edge of consciousness, sobbing quietly and mumbling an endless stream of apologies. His flesh had betrayed him.

Disease had run rampant through much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and its marks had been left on the bodies and minds of the New Continent’s citizens. Turning the corner, choosing not to look at the MDD shrine, he almost ran into one such example. Shuffling past him without words was something most people didn't see. It was wrapped in rags, swaddled like a contradiction, moving voluntarily but with such indecision that it was difficult to watch. No eyes peered up at him, and the body didn't make concessions for his presence - it just kept moving and hunkered down beside the shrine on the boulevard, in the shadows that Morgan's body swept out on the ground.

AIDS had mutated in the 2010s to become something much more terrifying. Africa had spawned this monster virus while the rest of the world worried about unimportant bugs like the Bird Flu and Constantine. In 2013, three million Africans died. In 2014, six million. There was no name for the virus, it took lives anonymously and without regard. Reckless abandon spewed over into 2015 when the virus made its way to continental Europe and India. America closed its doors, fearing the worst. Troops that were sent to control the mayhem on European soil did not return. Images crowded the television networks – bodies being ripped apart, racial lines being drawn between the African “hosts” and the white victims with guns and knives and fists, children wailing over their mothers and fathers, crowds rushing the Vatican, the Pope retreating to Canada – and then the images stopped and the news stopped and flights stopped and troops stopped going anywhere. Domestic issues were made significant in the wake of an international blackout. People didn’t talk anymore about Africa, and nobody seemed to care. The things that North America had seen were enough to keep their mouths shut, and while some might have had trouble falling asleep, while a collective conscious might have tossed notions of responsibility and compassion to and fro in a wild dance of insecurity, it was safe where they were. Of course, there were exceptions. There were victims here in the colonies that no one dared help or discuss. They were the betrayers that were locked away in a hush. Their victimization was inverted the moment they made their sickness known. No hospital stays or rehabilitation - just cold, gloved hands and the incinerator.

And the funny thing about ideology is that the physical will always betray it. The shrine meant to reinforce the notion that the physical was in control of the State, but the rags that moved beside it broke that promise in one fell swoop. He chuckled without humour and felt the foul mood dig deeper, into his heart and his lungs and his stomach. He hurried along down the alley, turning back just once to see the MDD carting the rag-man away into the night. Morgan had stopped moving, but from the end of the alley he couldn't tell if the sudden stillness was voluntary or not.

Life dragged on around him, in the scurrying rats of the alley and the screaming skyjets that rallied around the rich in the sky. He dragged his feet a few more steps and entered the simbar. Night closed around the door and the shrine on the boulevard was already being taken down. Quick, yes, but undoubtedly significant.