| Wendy’s smooth face is covered with spray. Little, tiny drops of blood
shimmering on the pale skin. Immaculate. Maximum virtual carnality. Palpable
three-dimensionality in the broadcast figures. What the experts class as the excited
chips effect. A magical moment when chips attain emotion. Achievable at times, on rare
occasions, by means of implants of virtual flesh in exceptionally gifted artists. But that
was later.
Expression: see page 38.
Exactly at the moment she discovers Peter Pan sitting
on the carpet, weeping for the loss of his shadow.
Boy… Why are you crying? Porous voice. Of printed
paper.
Her question, already a classic, started the show. No
one remembered what the question had meant for the character created by Disney,{1} centuries before. The question expressed hope, a reaffirmation of the
invincibility and inexhaustible capacity for progress of the human race. Supreme poetry of
Technology and Entertainment.
The audience goes wild. The amphistudio (capacity
three hundred thousand; packed) reverberates. Twenty thousand million people in China and
many thousand millions more all over the Firm Lands, the lunar colonies and what remains
of Europe applaud, touched by the art of the greatest of the Poets of the Church of the
Born-Again Serial Killers.
But that was before.
The Sky which protected Mic City, the most important
megacity of the Firm Lands, at the mouth of the Hudson River, was broadcasting the event
live. The Sky was a bubble made up of layers of filters attached to an infinite plastic
alloy mesh which protected the inhabitants of the city island from the poisonous rays of
the naked sun. Seas of ozone-loss in the riddled atmosphere. The Sky rested its concrete
and steel legs in the space once occupied by Queens, Brooklyn, Hoboken, Jersey City, in
the muddy bottom of the bay next to the also roofed-over Statue of Liberty. Extremities
that were sunk in the earth beneath which throbbed the subterranean cities that ringed the
island. The Sky covered with screens of liquid crystal, segmented in sections at the
disposal of powerful advertisers and the Corporation Channels. Regarded as the first
wonder of the civilization that came into being with the Age of New Order.
This time the Sky was not a variegated explosion of
different ads, music, bodies and voices, but was a simultaneous broadcast. Not since the
Programmed Plagues for exterminating peoples decreed "inferior, non-consumers,
non-human and disposable" by the Convention of Consumption and World Salvation could
anyone recall such a unanimous interest on the part of the Corporation Channels.
Only the matches of the League of Gods or the Great
Annual Sports Mass drew larger audiences than the shows of Wendy, who was universally
regarded as one of the most popular and influential media-aesthetic personalities in the
history of humanity.
The animal was grazing peacefully. It ambled slowly,
nibbling the juicy stalks, from time to time swishing its tail with a nervous movement
that made the skin of its flanks shudder in a repulsive spasm. An inattentive observer
might have supposed this to be a virtual animal, like the rest of the studio, which
reproduced a meadow bursting with spring, brilliant with flowers; but every observer there
knew that it wasn’t. This had been verified by the strict controls of the World
Entertainment Commission, beyond all doubt an unbribable institution. They had certified
that this animal, contentedly chewing virtual grass, was the last natural zebra of the
species (kept in a private zoo, bought at an antiques auction by the Disney Corporation,
and subsequently donated to the Church of the Born-Again Serial Killers). Although the
official confirmation was hardly necessary. A closer inspection revealed imperfections
(skin spoiled by blemishes, a scratch by its lip, stained and irregular teeth, a scar on
one ear; the characteristic unpleasant musty smell of natural creatures) unimaginable in a
virtual animal.
Wendy (a.k.a. The Artist, The Apostle and Master
Number One, among other names) appeared, surrounded by assistants, amid the tremendous
clamour of the Planetary Choir of Blind Children (a voluntary blindness which enhanced
their musical talent) intoning the DNA Hymn. The audience, overwhelmed, watched with bated
breath. The purification ceremony began. Kiuty, priestess and inseparable companion of the
Master (who was not yet Wendy, the transformation had not yet taken place), undressed him.
As the others prepared the attire, ironed the old white dress with its low bodice and
skirt adorned with lace (a delightful period touch) and set out in meticulous order the
weapon and the silver receptacle at one end of the famous ceremonial table, Kiuty removed
all the hair from Wendy’s pale fragile body and cut off the penis and the testicles.
Members of virtual flesh, of course, but the operation was impressive nonetheless. The
shaver zipped over The Artist’s body, giving squeals of joy. With a skilful slash the
priestess delineated the delicate hairless lips of the girl’s sex. Perfumed panties.
Rustle of the dress, arms raised. Talc. She put on the sky-blue ribbon, which exposed the
small, delicate, translucent ears.
Kiuty took a step back. She tipped her head in a
gesture of approval. An outfit of a deep turquoise colour, full of oval holes through
which shone the coppery skin. Suck on the right nipple. Pause. Suck on the left nipple.
Exclamations left off in ecstasy. Applause. Hurricane
of emotions. Planetary gasps. Millions of new applications for genetic manipulation of
germinal lines on unborn baby girls. Women who want daughters like Kiuty. Or like Wendy.
Millions of applications for ephemeral degradable clones of Kiuty and Wendy for purposes
of Sexual Entertainment.
Kiuty had special suck-suck antigravitational breasts,
which her dress exposed to view, and she suctioned these as she performed her task to the
delight and admiration of the spectators. Public self-satisfaction was very much in
fashion, although it was regarded as rather snobbish in intellectual circles.
One of the assistants, with impeccable, shining
artificial black skin, wore his phallus outside his purple overall, in a yellow sheath
which ended in front of his mouth. The pink glans emerged a few centimetres from his face.
From time to time he licked it with his tongue. Forty billion human beings sighed in
unison. In the clinics of Webland millions underwent implants of virtual penises in the
Suckable Length style.
When Wendy was ready she walked over to the table that
stood out, beautiful, archaic and metallic, in the middle of the flower-studded meadow.
She distilled purity. The bees buzzed musically, the butterflies flitted sparkling about.
Her dress, gauzy and delicate, brushed the tips of the dewy grass. Cotton stockings,
dotted with hand-embroidered pink flowers; patent leather shoes.
They brought the animal.
Four burly assistants laid it upside down on the
table. Close-up. Horror... it was sweating! General outcry. Disgust. Shudder in the white
stripes. Shudder in the black stripes. Wendy adjusted her gloves. She took the laser knife
and made a delicate gesture. The head of the zebra fell into the silver receptacle. Red
fountains hissed. The meadow had gone. Continuous marble floor. Which added to the impact
of the show. The marble would be cut up and sold to leading Museums and collectors who
were bidding at that very moment in Sotheby's, the auctioneers who handled Wendy’s
art.
The Planetary Choir of Blind Children intoned the
Virtual Planet Hymn.
Sprinkling. Wendy’s smooth face is covered with
spray. She smiles. Close-up. Ecstasy.
The zebra’s head blinks; a welling up of
primitive terror in the eyes; the slobbering tongue hanging out. Thick rope of saliva.
Close-up. Cries of horror from the crowd. Hysterical screams.
The body kicks; torso arches. Assistants restraining
the shuddering extremities. Close-up.
Laser knife slicing the abdomen of the hoofed animal.
Multiple shot. Skin opening, entrails exposed; Wendy’s face: beauty, balance, purity.
Dedication to The Saving Cause of Total Virtuality according to the Teachings of the
Resurrected. Simultaneous shot. Receptacle overflowing. Close-up. Clotted blood.
Ceremonial knife. Close-up: armed hand. Hindquarters. Fore quarters. Mystic gestures.
Musicality. Legs severed. Multiple shot. Four obscenely gaping wounds where the legs had
been. Circle of bone in the centre of the steaming flesh.
Close-up: Wendy’s face. Message: I sacrifice
myself for you, I submit myself to this stench for you, I make poetry of this filth, I put
an end to this evolutive excrescence so that we can have a better world, for our God Mic
The Resurrected and for you. Brothers! She introduces her arms into the bloody mess and
extracts the organs. Stomach, liver, intestines. Kidneys. She exhibits them in all their
natural, imperfect, corrupt, mortal, dripping reality. Urine, excrement. Detritus.
Shrieks. Smells.
Pools of blood pattern the continuous marble.
Eighty billion shocked, disgusted eyes. Eighty billion
expressions of shame that their owners ever had anything to do with that source of pus and
worms.
Sales of virtual pet zebras soar, up by fifty per cent
every minute. The kids’ model, weight four kilos, height thirty centimetres, sold
complete with perpetual flowering meadow, overtakes its rivals. Two hundred million copies
of Virtual is Better, the Artist’s latest best-seller, are sold in a record time of
twenty minutes. A thousand million people ask to move permanently to Webland and leave the
Old Order.
Wendy terminates the carving up. As usual in her
presentations, a panel of theologians is getting ready to talk about the advantages of
virtual flesh and the humiliating, degrading conditions to which the human species was
once subject. Accompanied on its evolutionary course by repugnant and infectious species
of animals.
Now the stage is clean again, the offal removed and
incinerated, the flowery meadow returns, the rhythmic bees, the butterflies. A dozen
dancing children lead on an eternal virtual zebra. It walks, springy and radiant.
Ovations. Hysterical screams. Singing. Weeping. Hymn of the Church of the Born-Again
Serial Killers sung by the Planetary Choir of Blind Children. Thunderous applause.
Multiple shot of the panellists.
A sigh of relief from billions of throats: passing
through the ruins, the devastated continents, the endless tunnels, the underground cities,
the poisoned seas, the garbage lands, the shining roofed-in megacities, the decayed
atmosphere, the infinite and growing landscapes of Webland.
Close-up: Wendy’s face.
Tendernesschip.
______________________________________________
1. At the time of speaking (August 2205) I felt
it was unnecessary to mention the discredited legend which attributes to an obscure
Scottish writer, a certain J. M. Barrie, the creation of the character Wendy. It has been
amply demonstrated that she is a product of the sacred, immortal and immeasurable genius
of the Disney Corporation. (Author’s note) back
|
Tendernesschip
Fiction