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Susan Bonutto

don't feed The Machine

I wish to impress upon the readers as they read this opening page that this is neither fiction nor reality. It is purely it, words upon a page. Take it for what you think it is and by the end you will know.

Anger is the extremist reaction to pain, and I was in anger and pain and could no longer function. It gurgled deep inside, erupting now and again. But it would not leave. It was there, and I could not escape it. Unless of course, I was rescued by Loyola and his kind. Loyal and intelligent Loyola, who had quietly watched all fall down at the knees of the human machine, before it became human and dictator. Their kind had moved among us, observant but not judgmental, and it had been us that had implored them, and we scrounged money from the State to build what I now sat in to await my transition. It was our choice their kind had taken over, once we had fallen to our knees: corruption and passion for machines in walls had bled dry the world and its people. Our need to select genes and shape our future generations had broken down when the young had suddenly aged and realised they were not to blame for their fathers actions, nor blamed for a world controlled by a monopoly and forefathers thinking only of Today.

A world still smoldering from being branded, which seduced us, and adorned all things, yet concealed pain caused elsewhere and created a gloss of synthetic decoration. We were seduced by the second campaign for equality, but life continued as normal and children began murdering each other.

This was the only solution in line with Nature's instinct for survival, to allow time for the Earth to stop and so regenerate her resources; to disinfect children before it restarted. And It would restart.

I looked across at the woman, Lucy, weeping in the cell opposite. She looked across at me with eyes that recognised the reason for my pain, her eyes too bulging from too many tears. We exchanged opinions in glances and I returned to the secular, inner comfort of the shadow and the dark. Loyola returned to his preferred post outside her cell and howled. Such a twisting howl of pain of separation from his beloved owner and Lucy stretched out her fingers that sought to draw comfort from the dog. Loyola whined, conversing with her in the language only she understood, and she laughed. And then I laughed, and then we both giggled!

"It's about time, innit Loyola, eh? Me and you knew this all along, didn't we! Oy, gis a fag, George"

The mood had lightened.

"None left mate. An' they don't like us smoking d'they, how long you got left, Luce? "Two months."

We were inhabitants of the new Cleansing Clinic, it's function to scan humans and monitor them for infections picked up from the previous domain. I was a relatively recent arrival; Lucy had already been there for two months. She had known.

"Well, it won't be much longer for you either. Loyola's gonna find me a place when I get out. An' you can come an' stay when you're out too, in that right Loy?"

We were kept well, and people arrived, lowly, humbled and willing to submit to any rigorous inspections to escape the concrete claws and bars of the former world. This meant people had to be moved into temporary uncomfortable and overcrowded accommodation. Loyola and his kind had joined us to build new and livable quarters for those willing to succumb to an initial, painless, yet nonetheless humiliating process of de-corruption. Those found soiled were immediately destroyed for fear of their disease strangling the new life.

My simmering angst and disillusionment was diagnosed by Loyola and the other dogs, and found to be destructive to the newness, which was not so much Brave as in an infancy stage. I had chosen to be left in solitary confinement, to meditate as a monk in a cleansing ritual, for as long as necessary. I would be there for some time yet, I knew, contemplating where that bitterness should be placed.

I rose towards the window; had spent too long in dark corners, my unaccustomed eyes slowly being seduced by the light, to glimpse what this canine species offered us now. My eyes over familiar with ugliness, could no longer recognise or believe flat images offering promises that fulfilled their owners greed. It was essential I return to that former place and revenge myself on its true cause.

Lucy immediately sensed the decision and winked as I got up. I hurled my rucksack on my back, on my 'Last Voyage' to 'Metropilis' to revenge those responsible for the toneless towers.

I used the now defunct Underground and the former Tube Map to trudge through tunnels to Finsbury Park. As I immerged from the decadent transport system, I noticed a dead black child on her back (though her race barely recognisable now) and her flesh had been scavenged. Beside her lay a replica of those bones in the body of a white child lying next to her (friends perhaps, on their way home on that final day). I continued my journey along the route I had used every day.

I sat on the bench where I had first been infected with anger and revenge. On the bench in a playground of a school where I had taught for two years; in a playground that now lay scattered with beer bottles and plastic bags for glue and knives and guns. Left behind by the children on their final day at school. Summer Holidays had begun and the new term had never actually started ever again.

The building above was adorned with swastika graffiti, the local National Front group had left their mark at this school in the Summer Term. The children's bodies had decayed and their bones gnawed by scavengers who roamed the streets, scavengers unable to believe the cashpoint had been removed from their shiny grey metallic walls. Fires were lit and bodies used to fuel them. A group to my left, glazed and moronic, were kneeling down in their morning sacrificial ritual, the offering of an exhausted computer to one of their pagan gods.

I had glimpsed all I needed to see. From my pocket I pulled out my door key, the only thing left from the Brave Trashed World, and I threw it and turned away before it landed. I held my eyes closed till I had once again reached the Cleansing Clinic.

But I stopped. I wanted to observe those scavengers and their suffering; enjoy it, and perhaps add to it. They had not been humiliated enough. Since the unrest, we had witnessed a decline in our surroundings. My aggressive body rotated and led me to the scene of the massacre. I sat on the bench for the second time and watched these scavengers. Their bodies had been contorted by the wires that attached them to their machines. Their faces a soft mass of pulp from lack of use of expression or word. Their teeth and saliva dribbled over those who were innocent yet somehow blamed and killed in the violence. Globes of pussed pupils bulged out from over indulgence and satisfaction at stealing that, which should have been ours. Former monopolies, their accounts attached to tubes suctioning in a circular pumping motion, extracting, bleeding more and more from those in poverty. I saw one glance up and smile sadistically at his next victim, dead by now, lying near him. I picked up two bones and crushed the skull till the green decayed braincells oozed forth.

The deed was done and I returned, ready for transferal to a new world, prepared by Loyola and the canine species, where paper was not wasted with printed images of past ruling royalty gone-out-of-date.

I was woken be the anesthetist in a bleached white room and whilst recovering drifted off into sleep again. Humans were sleeping on beds all around me, entering their first hibernation period. Whilst sleeping I was transferred to the last green blade, part of an old park. My second awakening was to the sounds of pigeons cooing, a sound reminding me of mornings at my parents' home, an alarm call into a safe haven created by their love, too safe perhaps. I saw a striped deckchair in front of a river, with a woman resembling my auntie; she was clasping an ice-cream, and I imagined running to her, embracing her. And then I saw a playground, with children on the climbing frame and I laughed a laugh that others would have entitled mad, but I knew that I was not.