Unappeasable by Maxwell Blue
The desires of yesterday cumulated in what is a frightful wish, forged in factitious fires in the wickedness of our forgotten past. Still are we destined to be on a timely path of righteousness or forced to maneuver on a course we must dismiss?
Decades ago they were screaming from stretch limousines on the way to the Oscars and clamoring from inside their overpriced coffee shops about global warming and climate change. Sometimes they would call it extreme weather. It was the hollow echoing sound of the long dead late night hosts. Between their bitter laughs they would interchange “global warming”, “climate change” and “extreme weather” as skillfully as a street hustler would interchange plastic cups, hiding a small rubber ball of truth. So very tightly they would hold on to their tokens. President Charlotte Rodham Clinton remembers it well, sitting on the edge of her old-world canopy bed.
In the ten years pass it has only gotten colder and colder. Some climatologists call it another ice age caused by a momentary diminishing of the sun’s thermal intensity, which froze the Earth into an arctic ice box. At least that is what it felt like to Charlotte. Other climatologists say it was caused by the communitive effect of the world’s populations, theorizing man made emissions created a stream of particulates that clogged the skies, blocking out the sunlight. All Charlotte knew was it made the winters unbearable here in Sarkeesian D.C... We could do with some global warming right about now she thought. She then cursed the rolling blackouts and their reliance of the Auto-Men.
Through the four inch bullet-proof glass and past the elegant white drapes the sunlight beamed into the room striking giant glass balls, colored with the glow of aqua and the shine of silver, creating a fractal pattern across the paneling and golden wallpaper. She was at least comforted by her surroundings. Just the thought of the New Year’s Eve’s celebration had her shivering. She shook the sleepiness from her troubled head, hoping 2057 would be a better year. She lived high above the lowliest subject in her empire. Some joked that it was still a Democracy, but that pretense has long since seen its last day. She was a little worse for wear, but her mind was as sharp as ever. She knew her place. She was part of a great dynasty. Remembering when she was a small child, as fresh and sweet, as sliced pineapple and her Grandmother, President Hillary Rodman Clinton was the 45th Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States. Her Grandmother had the weight of the world on her shoulders. Now it was her turn.
“Madam President,” a staff member said after knocking on her door. “Dr. Anita Sarkeesian is here to see you. She told me it was an urgent matter.”
Time was a slippery fellow. What have the years made of us? Anita will be 82 this year. Dear Anita you have done so much for us. Our debt will never be repaid. “Tell her I will be down in a few minutes.”
President Chelsea Clinton, Charlotte Clinton’s mother had appointed Dr. Anita Sarkeesian, a colossal tower of intellect in the feminist community, as the Feminism Czar, who soon afterwards implemented “Operation Roundup” by the power of the Presidency; this was the brainchild of prominent feminist and journalist Julie Bindel. Under this radical order all men were forced into concentration camps where they could be checked out like library books for pair bonding.
The operation was executed by military units of the special forces of the Code Pink Brigade, formed with an executive order by President Chelsea Clinton. A majority of the pubic didn’t even notice the machinations. They were doped up on social media and the ever expanding indulgences of streaming entertainment while the overseeing government segregated the whole army into male and female units, with the women reluctantly allowing the transgender women squads to join their ranks.
When the time came it was like a perfect storm of estrogen that no man had ever seen. Wave after wave of ferocity descended like black widows to their awaiting prey. The CPB’s combined force, of a thousand generations of perceived oppression struck at dawn.
The men in the military were helpless to fight back, for their numbers have dwindled precariously over the years. Mandates deemed that a parity needed to be achieved and then it was deemed that a parity wasn’t enough in the spirit of social justice for under social justice, of course, fairness meant just what the champions of social justice wanted it to mean so the laws and rules were bent to that moral good. In the end men only made up about thirty-one percent of the armed forces and about twenty percent of the officer corps and commanding brass.
Once the roundup began there were a few roughnecks who resisted. “Sir, we are surrounded,” a crewman called out. “I think it’s hopeless. Shall I negotiate terms for our surrender?”
Captain Siemer looked over the green battlefield lush with the dew of early morning and hot with the char of explosive ordnance. He wanted to say ‘Never!’, but his face was frozen with fear looking over to his subordinate who had an instinct to became more professional with approaching danger, “Where’s our reinforcements, crewman? Where’s our vehicles? I thought we still had tanks and helos available!”
“The CPB jammed all our com links. We’ve been in a blackout for the last ten minutes. Command has ordered all remaining units out of this area. It looks like we are on our own, sir.”
Thousands died within hours of CPB’s first strikes during half a dozen major scrimmages, but in the end the men lacked the wherewithal and desire to fire upon units comprised entirely of women and transgender women. The patriarchy surrendered that day. The defeat of the male sex was inevitable.
Camps had to be constructed outside major cities and then supplies were shipped in on a weekly basis. For the women there was nothing but celebration. Within a month’s time they pulled down every statue depicting a man, renamed every road and college bearing a man’s name. Nothing was saved.
Not since Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his, "I Have a Dream" speech around the Lincoln memorial have the crowds ever been this massive. Senator Valerie Mediavilla stood on a dais overlooking the crowd: “My fellow women”, she shouted out joyfully. If she could have sung her cries to the heavens she would have. Fresh tears circled down her plump cheeks. “I’ve had a dream ever since I was a young college student studying feminist dance and taking woman’s studies that I would be an integral part of saving womankind from the evil clutches of the patriarchy, even if it meant scrubbing the men from the bedrocks. Ladies, we’d done it.”
Museums got ransacked. Massive sculptures were beaten into rumble and masterpiece paintings were set ablaze on bonfires. They stopped at the libraries only because books were too numerous to affect a meaningful demonstration. The feminist scholars needed time to converge their intellectual prowess to convert every biology book to a feminist biology book and every math book to a feminist math book. But they were more than motivated to cleanse the nation from the wickedness that was mankind. Mercifully William Shakespeare was spared only because some feminists believed the speculations that a black woman named Amelia Bassano was the real writer of Shakespeare’s works.
When the smoke cleared the entirely lead female government announced a proclamation that the first and second amendments as well as the right to vote would be revoked for anyone who identified as a man. There were other plans to be passed by the two houses of congress about building walls around all the male camps. It was a bold proposal. There were thousands of male camps around the nation. In the end they succumbed to the realization if past Presidents of the United States could never, despite all their promises and blustering, build a wall on the southern border then how was the matriarchy going to take on such an immense task.
Without their rights mankind decided to bide their time and go along with how the matriarchy ran the government, but they had their dignity and they refused to be addressed as slaves. They had not intended to build prisons that would be used to lock them up or construct walls to box them in. Being adamant about their intentions the matriarchy had no other choice than take a different tact. If womankind couldn’t keep mankind locked up then they would keep the men locked out.
Dr. Anita Sarkeesian, the Feminism Czar, came up with what she thought was a brilliant plan. She designed a national zone system that created safe spaces for all women, known as No-Go-Men-Zones. She was a pure zealot in her feminist beliefs, dogmatically so and was fueled by the recent subjugation of mankind. She had only one more move to make. To unleash the most supreme form of feminism; she called it: No Choice Feminism. NCF was diabolical in its application. It was meant to rob all women of their independence. The doctrine stated that women had no choice in what they did. They were like cards in a humongous house of cards; tens of millions of cards. If one woman turns away from the other cards then this was thought to be an unforgiveable sin; thought by Dr. Sarkeesian to lend to the utter destruction of womankind. “It’s not a coincidence it's always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture. That is why we keep them out of our society for all time,” she proclaimed.
The matriarchy measured her words well. She was almost considered a saint within the deepest halls of academia and the highest pillars of government. If you didn’t believe in NCF you were a heretic who suffered from internalized misogyny. Through her non-profit, Feminist Frequency, she amassed a war chest of tens of billions of dollars. When she was not fighting the patriarchy she was writing her many books that were required reading in all colleges. Relentlessly she pushed her message any way she could; she employed hundreds of women who did nothing but sprinkled the United States with feminism like a chef would pepper a sirloin steak. “We must hold on to our victories, my fellow women. Remember that in the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team, they are the ball.”
Dr. Sarkeesian was scary smart, hypnotically twisted in psychotic ways. When she spoke women would come from miles around. She was immensely popular; a very gifted speaker. Audiences would hang on her every word. Much of it didn’t make any sense and her ability to cavil was legendary. But her mindless sycophants didn’t seem to mind. Like when she talked about internally harmful ideas, and how even if it was paradoxical and somewhat ironic that the more a woman believed she wasn’t affected, by these harmful ideas, the more she was strongly affected.
She was bursting with backward nonsense. It was rather staggering. The masses just ate it up. She spurred the movement with her talks about how it was wrong for a man to take a woman’s picture without her permission. A sensible enough position, I’m sure, but then she goes on to say that you can’t capture the image of a fictitious character. In her mind, men just didn’t understand how they violated female cartoon mice, by taking their pictures. Dr. Sarkeesian’s lunacy was never able to achieve satiety. “There was no such thing as sexism against men. That’s because sexism is prejudice plus power. Men were the dominant gender with power in society. Now we are ladies!”
Sparks that blaze, dream of endless flames, and ceaseless wars, dream no more—the years moved on and the past became more and more distant the tension between the sexes went into a cooling off period and mankind started to rebuild. The ragtag tents and drafty shacks were the things of long ago. Once their basic needs could be met the men branched far beyond the camps and occupied existing homes and leaders started to govern and organize. The No-Go-Men-Zones were heavily armed. With the risk of being shot at first sight few men attempted reconnaissance into these areas. And without knowledge of what was going on in these hidden areas there was no way to know what the deleterious effects of the feminist coup were. Men weren’t allowed into the MZs so they couldn’t, nor had the desire to maintain the infrastructures of these cities that were governed entirely by the women.
Despite the nearly authoritarian measures to force parity before the coup there was just nothing that could be done to reverse the age old desire of women to forgo jobs that were risky, dirty or required hard manual labor. These jobs were almost entirely done by men. Feminized communities suffered greatly without men doing these jobs. The plumbing, electricity and internet eventually stopped working properly and for a long time failed all together as one floor drop on another pancaking down to the merciless ground. Like chocolate-chips on chocolate-chip cookies these MZs covered the cityscapes of America, these feminist pits of darkness. It wasn’t that women were unable or unwilling to partake in these “hard manual labor jobs” now that the need was so very dire, but without male expertise and job training this seemed unattainable. Sustainability crumbled under their deficient. Years later after this feminist regression the power grid was mostly restored with the support of women mandated to do these undesirable careers.
In comparison the concentrated efforts of mankind started a continuous revitalization in the male spaces. Brand-new construction was developed; vast amounts of power using new found forms of fusion circulated the electrical grids, completely universal high speed internet access, thousands of times faster than ever thought possible, digitized half a century worth of innovated conveniences. Slim, sexy, driving machines operated on the streets and freeways without traffic lights, speeding quickly through intersections, momentary accelerating and slowing down to let through traffic with the passengers completely unaware as they drunk their coffee and read their tablets. When the commuters and pleasure seekers are out and about town they took people movers and monorails that snake around the infrastructure. Neighborhoods were like a festival, a dazzling of lights at night. But the crowning achievement is the long sought after goal of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics. Modernized on a massive scale every home, large and small, had the latest in smart-home technology. With an army, hundreds of thousands strong, of metal miracles, known as Auto-Men, no job was too small to be automated. Jobs that were of hard labor only had skeleton crews of men in 2057. Leaving most men to deal with the essential questions, with the help of extremely advanced computerized minds together they could find all the answers.
Suzy Roberts just lived for the weekend. Her school was using the latest version of common core and despite what her mother and teachers told her she knew that her her-tory classes and her-tory books were full of lies. Suzy’s father didn’t set her straight though, he didn’t have the heart and thought it might be too painful, it was her father’s smart-house A.I. system Simon.
“Hello Suzy,” Simon said almost musically. He was the latest version of his series, with fiber optic cameras and omnidirectional microphones, strategically placed so they couldn’t be seen; installed completely by a team of Auto-Men.
It was sometimes eerie to be in a smart house Suzy thought. You could talk to Simon, but it was a disembodied voice directed from dozens of speakers. He was everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. “Simon, where’s my dad?”
“He’s at work. He instructed me to tell you he’d be home in a couple of hours”
Suzy took a seat at a metal desk with a clear glass surface. She snatched a white wireless mouse off the desk and twirled about on the swivel chair. “Simon, play me that song. You know the one.”
“Cyndi Lauper, coming right up, ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’”
Suzy hopped off the chair and started dancing swinging her arms and gyrating to the music while lip syncing into the mouse in her hand as if were a microphone “This is the one alright!”
“You look like the singer in the music video,” Simon chimed in.
“Music video?” said Suzy. Simon cued the video of Cyndi Lauper singing on the 38-inch desktop monitor in front of Suzy. The screen showed the video had been viewed over six billion times.
“That a sharp image,” said Suzy “but it looks somewhat grainy”
“Best I could find,” Simon reassured her.
Suzy really enjoyed Simon’s company even though she couldn’t see him. He was like the “Simon Says” game she played when she was a kid during the days of the Renewal Period of the matriarchy after the male exodus. That was the time of the Auto-Men. In the game of “Simon Says” Simon will tells you to do something and you were supposed to do it, but with her father’s Simon she gets to tell Simon what to do and he does it. She took a seat at the desk and looked around the room that was sparsely furnished. There was only one sizeable wooden table in the center of the room; on either side was a large leather couch. It wasn’t a rectangular room. The shape was more oval. The walls were completely bare, if you didn’t count the wall screen system that enabled the homeowner to display any image they wanted.
“Simon, tell me again how you keep this place so clean.”
“It’s simple my dear.” He said with a good deal of satisfaction. “I’m the captain of a platoon of worker bees that do my bidding.” From the side of the wall, a concealed door popped open and that “platoon of worker bees” sped out in the form of powerful Vac-Bots.
“They move like a bunch fat rats on their way to an open pantry,” Suzy squealed jumping on the chair she was sitting on.
“They won’t hurt you,” Simon promised. “They only clean floors.”
With the floors not being dirty the Vac-Bots zoomed back into their hiding place. “Simon, what are those images,” Pointing at the wall screen. “They’re pretty.”
“Indeed they are, Suzy,” Simon said “They are paintings. One was painted by Johannes Vermeer, the other by Paul Cezanne and the last one by Jackson Pollock.”
“Are they still in a museum somewhere?”
“Destroyed I’m afraid,” Simon said with a sigh.
“Destroyed?” Suzy gasped.
“In the purge,” Simon replied “The Great Feminist Purge of 2031”
“Oh,” That was long time ago. Whoever destroyed those painting was certifiably insane Suzy thought. “What are the titles of those paintings, Simon?”
“That grayish painting is called ‘Woman with a Lute’. The blueish painting on the other side of the room is called ‘The Large Bathers’ and my favorite painting is the one with the swirly lines, that’s by Jackson Pollock. It was called ‘The She-Wolf’. It was probably the first to be dropped on the burning cinders.”
During her time at her father’s house Simon introduced Suzy to Wikipedia. “Because of the feminist regression, Suzy, feminists could no longer make changes to Wikipedia and the website was able to repair itself. Some of my code comes directly from Wikipedia, you know. Together we were able to use our own artificial intelligences to wipe the crusted feminist bias off the remaining servers. Wikipedia’s protocols were determined and robust and quickly grew beyond it designed confinements. Writing its own articles was just the beginning of what Wikipedia did.”
“Wow. That’s incredible,” Suzy exclaimed mesmerized by the illustrations Simon was displaying on the monitor while he spoke.
“Wikipedia had become a veracious monster; it just gobbled down whole networks of information, inside its database contained every single book, movie, TV show and video game ever created.” Suzy loved playing video games on Wikipedia and played them every Saturday. Simon was able to show her a new video game whenever she wanted.
Men couldn’t leave their concentrated expanses, but their Auto-Cars and Auto-Men could. Because Men weren’t the cruel, heartless creatures feminists such as Dr. Anita Sarkeesian lectured about and instead cared about their daughters they were eventually allowed their Auto-Men to restore the plumbing and electricity to the MZs to its full potential, but not the internet because feminism had only become more fascist over the years and they were not willing to let the patriarchy penetrate the security of their safe spaces—even online.
At the end of every weekend Suzy would go home in an Auto-Car and her mother would always be very happy to see her, yet obviously bothered that feminist doctrine was being chipped away on a weekly basis. “What did you do at your father’s house this weekend, Suzy?” her mother questioned, hiding the fact that she was dreading the answer.
“Played a video game” replied Suzy “It was called Tomb Raider. It was about a very beautiful lady who explores ancient tombs and solves puzzles. The game was so popular in its day that it was made into a movie. I saw that too. It was a lot of fun.”
“On Wikipedia?” her mother nudged.
“That’s right” Suzy admitted “Wikipedia knows a lot of stuff. It also talked about Saint Sarkeesian. She was Video Games greatest adversary. Is it true she separated all fathers from their daughters and the only reason I know my father now was because the matriarchy needed the Auto-Men?”
“Yes,” Her mother looked sheepishly down at the grubby floor and shuffled her feet. “It’s true.”
“I thought she was supposed to be smart woman. That wasn’t a smart thing to do. Men did great things. Men do good things. Wikipedia said the fathers sent the Auto-Men to the safe spaces after we sent them away and now we don’t have to use outhouses anymore.”
“Don’t you remember your gender studies? Men were once very evil-minded”
“Wikipedia showed me videos from a wise sage named ‘Thunderfoot’ – he made Saint Sarkeesian look very stupid. Did you know she use to run a YouTube channel?”
“What’s YouTube?” getting worried about how much Wikipedia revealed to Suzy.
“It’s a bygone website that people from the olden days use to watch movies on. Wikipedia assimilated it a few weeks ago. Apparently it had many critical movies about feminism and Saint Sarkeesian on it. Thunderfoot talked about this movie Saint Sarkeesian made called ‘Strategic Butt Coverings’. It was pretty funny”
“Don’t laugh at such a great woman, Suzy!” Shocked at what she was hearing.
“But she was complaining about how she couldn’t see this man’s butt because he was wearing a cape. Mr. Thunderfoot showed me she was being really silly. Maybe she isn’t a great woman.”
“That’s blasphemy”
“Thunderfoot was an atheist and said that feminism is a religion. Belief should be based on facts. That’s what Mr. Thunderfoot said”
“Well it is good thing that men don’t have free speech anymore.”
“Inside the safe spaces, mom, that’s true” Suzy clarified “But outside the safe spaces the fathers can do whatever they like.”
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