Mary’s Children (at the edge of the age of reason)
The jewels on her hands, shimmering in the rose tinged light from the midday sunlit dome above, reflects on the clockwork inside the dove’s breast. Mary’s alabaster fine nailless fingers grasp lightly along silvery tool, playing within the body of the dove, as if conducting an orchestra. She hesitates, biting upon her blue lower lip, withdraws the sleek silver needle from the dove’s torso, and closes its skin. The purple plumage now hides the gearing.
Mary, stroking the top of the doves soft head, places it onto the white table, and the animal ambles, puffs it purple body, and begins to coo a Phrygian scale. Mewling a clarion E, the dove takes flight in a pastel fury, and Mary smiles in satisfaction, and rises from the table.
Mary’s bone toned bare feet silent glide over the white warm floor. Her dress, a kaftan made from beaded rubies and emeralds, hung loosely over her thin long pale form. Sitting upon her white divan, she spreads her legs, placing her hands between them, lightly rubbing the jewels on her clitoris, before moving her hands to her swollen stomach. She lays her head back to gaze above at the mechanical avian symphony occurring above her, smirking at these relics of the platinum age.
Mary smiles at her darling conceit with each fowl tuned to a different, yet compatible scale. The vermilion hummingbirds create a modulating tonal hum, the golden albatross beat out a rhythm, lime thrushes ran Doric scales, electric blue tanagers all tuned a half octave apart, and an orange falcon excising all tonalities that had fallen behind.
She had loved to play with her song birds since her childhood at the dawn of the platinum age. Her mother (with her tall think body and her night colored hair) had brought Mary to the electronics shop when she was nine. That day Mary had her left eye removed for the first time and replaced with the opal that allowed her to control and see what her birds saw, and to direct them, to conduct them. Mary had begged her mother for months, all of the other girls already had an eye removed, how could she face them with two bag like eyes. Mary remembered the joy of seeing the world through the lens of the Opal and the songbirds eyes, leading her first magenta sparrow with her silica gaze, running through sonatas.
The jade of her right eye never leaves the birds, as the opal of her left tours their different perspectives. Never turning her head, her nailless hand reaches to the black jar on the table, so as to makeup her face. The black dust crawls up her alabaster fingers, as runs them across her brow, and her cheeks. As the machines burrow into her face, Mary reminisces for her former faces. Long nose, sharp nose, pug nose, high cheeks, round cheeks, high brow low brow, how would she makeup her face today?
Mary smiles as her blue lips fill out, listening to the chorale of her songbirds. How quaint antique technology is, remnants of a simpler time, a human time. A time before there were Patricians and proles (but she was always Patrician, she got that from her mother with the night colored hair).
Watching these child’s delights frolicking in the crimson sunlight radiating through the dome, brings back memories of street sounds, cars, house pets, parties, children and other things long extinct.
Yet Mary feels little nostalgia, remembering the waste, decadence and excess of the platinum age. She and the other Patricians had been midwives to the birth of the age of reason, ending the gluttony of the proles. Prole hungers left chaos, breeding and brutality. Patrician hungers sucked the life out of the world, stilling the tides, turning the fields to sand and dust.
Memories of the end of the platinum age, standing on the wall of the camps as the hungry and wretched proles filed in, lead by Mary’s children. She was a he then, Marin, muscle for war and filled with nanotech, correcting and perfecting her/his body, rebraiding chromosomes. Like a god Marin stood, watching the children herd the proles, the weak and humble masses, to their pens.
Now Marin was Mary and the platinum was dead. Now the proles are in their pens where they belonged. Now she lives, bored, in the age of reason. And now Mary’s toes curl anticipating bringing that too. to an end.
Music fills her eyes as she reflects when she cleaned the world. Memories of when time was measured by the by seconds, minutes, hours, measured by the teaspoon. Seasons would pass, leaves would change, the water would move. The world no longer has the energy for seasons, The Patricians had seen to that, they had sucked it dry. They harnessed the energies of the world, bringing it into their domes, leaving little other than waste and reason beyond their walls. This is a year without a summer. No, it is another year without a summer, without a winter, fall, or spring. It was another year without a year.
Soon no more boredom. Soon she would see her siblings again, soon she would take her children to see their uncles. Wouldn’t it be fun to see the look on the Patrician faces, on George’s face, when she leads her children over the sands to soak the wasted land with blood.
Mary runs her hands over her swollen belly, and smiles. She rises to her feet and walks across the white floor, to the white gate of the fleischgarten. As Mary crosses the threshold the smell of life enfolds her.
Be they pigs or proles, the fruit trees hold them in rows, ripening full of Mary’s children. She walks down the white rows, gazing at the cerise color trunks branching to the mulberry toned boughs, holding, restraining, her guest, who were here children’s’ hosts. Face after face in rictus, you could barely tell the difference between the animals, of course there was a difference of degree.
The pigs are only good for simple children. Rows of them hang before Mary, pig legs and arms akimbo as if strapped to St. Andrews Cross, distended full stomachs writhing filled with helpers: workers, messengers, beasts of burden. All the inefficiencies of mechanical processes replaced by the rationality of organic processes, they way a Glyptapanteles wasp replaces a caterpillar. Pigs are wonderful to breed her most helpful children, but for things that hunt and kill, like her spiders. proles are needed.
When her children lash the pigs to the trees, the pigs quickly relent, accepting the trees which punctured, proliferated, soothed and fed them. Proles, showing the attributes so needed for a hunter, would struggle for weeks.
When Mary first learned to birth her spiders, she would have the proles gagged but soon the screams were the only thing to break the tedium, and so she would mix their sounds with the tones of her mechanical birds. The avian tonality plays well against the atonality of prole terror.
Mary softly walks the white lanes, that ran between the fruit trees and the sanguine baths that fed them. She chuckles as the occasional eye opens to follow her, as she approaches the cells of the kindergarten.
Behind the glass walls of the kindergarten, the menagerie pulses and surges as Mary’s children see their mother pass. Enormous muscled bodies to pull, small dexterous hands to manipulate, squat round caretakers of the plants, and her beautiful spiders. The are 13 of her hands tall, arachnid forms, covered in black fur, radiating from their small hairless humanoid torsos. Each spider has the same face, that of a little girl, showing their family resemblance to their mother.
Percy, sweet Percy, had realized the end of the platinum age was near. We could concretize endless desires as proles sucked the world dry with their hungers. It was Percy who realized it was us or them and called for the culling of the proles. Percy who pursued the biomechanical, and Percy who had died in the teeth of the first hunters. Mary’s contribution to the Patrician revolt was family, basing Patrician technology on Patrician DNA, tracing down her own genome, liberating submerged genetic codes into new beings. Patricians breeding predators. All that was needed was to nano select the desired heredic features, clean the chromosomes, and create faithful children. Mary realized that if you can’t trust family, who can you trust. In the spiders were Mary’s own genetics, in their faces is her former face, her child face, except for their mouths being an archipelago of razors in the center of a smile.
It was Percy who was the visionary, Mary who had found the way. What had George done, but bloviate and bully, or as he would say, lead. And lead he did, and the children followed, shambling orange apes, black rats, turquoise wolves, and the skittering of spiders, staining the white sands red with the blood of the parasites proles who had long stopped serving any purpose. Mary gave proles a purpose, something new to serve.
And how was she repaid? Exile to her far off dome, while George set up the domed gardens and divided the earth, he set the stasis that marked the age of reason. It would be George who would be the first one to die. The domed gardens the first to be shattered.
Mary strokes her bloated belly as she stands at the edge of the age of reason. She smiles in delight as her womb shudders and rocks within her. This virgin birth, brought forth on whim and desire to end this sickening statis. What is it within her? Her belly quivers to the battering against her inner walls. Whatever it is, she is the mother, she was father, and she would give herself night black hair. She had twisted her own genes into herself like a mobius strip. What a joy, to end the boredom of determinism, to shatter reason beneath her bone toned heel. She smiles the calm smile of a mother, waiting for her child to tear its way out of the womb, and lead it’s siblings, slouching toward Bethlehem to give birth to a new age.
Mary’s Children (at the edge of the age of reason) by J.E. D’Ulisse / NC BY 3.0 US 2016
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