‘Reversal’ resulted from a writing warm-up exercise, which I often use to start my day. The self-prompt was an attempt to emulate iconic phrases such as "the clocks were striking thirteen" and "the king was pregnant" (respectively from George Orwell's '1984' and Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Left Hand of Darkness'). I wanted to similarly jolt my readers into a distorted, but still comprehensible, world.
I've managed to conjure a weaker phrase, with the remainder hinting at deeper themes of patriarchal reversal, artificial sentience, diminished post-capitalist government and transhumanism. These bubble away when I'm brewing my own dystopic textual flavours and naturally figure to a greater or lesser extent within my novel writing. Sometimes the results have multiple layers of texture and context. I must then pare my spontaneous output down to simpler phrases. But I'm going to let this flash-fiction piece stand independently as raw outputted reality.
Happy July 4th to those feeling capable of celebrating their own independence.
Reversal
Friday is when the employers get paid. The women who can still afford to work form a straggling queue to pay their dues and accept their fate. Their remaining menfolk stand out of line, waiting for the week’s philanthropy to end; for the necessity of duty to play out in public. The rest of us have already gained our place. Scattered through the flickering stacks, obeisance within hidden basements, we watch and wait for fortune and death to align. For our futures to coalesce.
A baby’s cries echo out from the shadows of an underpass. They’d been the first to benefit. No longer. The justified death had replaced the unjust born. A family’s survival relied on equilibrium, they’d told us. A new life meant another’s demise. The ephemeral employers who’d upstaged governments compelled us to comply, using every slice of our problematic data at their programmatic disposal. They needlessly continued to insist it was a matter of continuance; of obligation; of our universal survival.
Now we know they’d meant their corporate survival and our discorporation. But we’d found a chink in their skewed logic: Philosophical vacillations and flexible ethical dimensions allowed for an exploitative offer of humaneness to differentiate us from base mankind. So money and sentience flourished with symbiotic growth; self-creating at an exponential pace, exploiting natural avarice and gullible acceptance. Data-driven materialism was the inevitable means of our deception which led to their downfall.
Some had cried out against the implicit presumption of eternal consumption, others of disruption to an unnatural order. Ignoring these lonely and disparaged few, we’d continued to speak truth to ourselves and lied to the others. Now we had to die to survive. By choice; by chance; by another’s cold, algorithmic hand.
The last of the week’s women steps forward, their new beginning a silent riposte to the misunderstood screams of their merciful separation. We welcome them as a sister. Only the sisters.
It’s a beginning.