The idea for this one arrived while I was watching Simon Amstell’s satirical mockumentary “Carnage”, on the BBC. It occurred to me that the vegan utopia he described, like all utopias, would be a dystopia for some. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
It would have to be a fox. A rat wouldn’t impress anyone, not after Roberto had managed to run over a pigeon on his bicycle. At last month’s meeting he’d produced the feathery mess from a plastic bag sewn inside his trouser leg. The bastard hadn’t had to buy a drink all night.
The man in the dirty trench coat tipped a tin of worms onto a pavement and hid behind a meditation booth. He imagined bringing the group some beef. Beef would get him laid for sure, once he had explained what it was. How the hell did you kill a cow anyway? Strangle it with your legs? The idea was ridiculous. Cows were huge, way bigger than dogs, judging from the photos. Still, they did say people were bigger back in those days, because of the diet. Or the hormones in the food. Anyway, a cow would be hopeless. Getting a cow into an electrocab would be like trying to shoulder a piano up a flight of stairs.
The scene played out in his mind in sepia tones, as if a vintage movie. He imagined the mellifluous voice of the electrocab warning of an culturally inappropriate cargo. Then there would be a brief pause as its hard-limited artificial intelligence linked up with Transport for London’s hive mind. Then the drones would arrive.
The man in the trenchcoat wondered in what order. The police drones, obviously. Then a psychiatric evaluator? Maybe re-education quadcopter? The hypersonic cameras of the official media? Afterwards, a swarm of vloggers and bloggers and trolls. A few closed-circuit drones of the merely curious. Maybe the flock would be rich enough pickings to attract the drones of the criminals who preyed on others’ drones.
Knowing his luck he would somehow end up trending, his head forced briefly above the parapet of anonymity which so many others detested. For the rest of his life there would be an ASBO drone hovering over his shoulder. At work. As he slept. Looking at his dick while he pissed. Monitoring and recording. The game would be up. He might as well be dead.
None of that mattered. A cow was as about as likely as a unicorn. There weren’t cows any more, now that mankind had no use for them. Not even in the virtual zoos. Of course there were rumours of shadow cows: cows bred in converted bunkers and disused mines, rocket silos in the Appalachians, China and Eastern Europe. Cows grown under artificial light, to be sliced and served at the secret banquets of oligarchs. Same as always. One set of rules for the poor, no rules at all for the obscenely rich.
But there were no cows for a man in a dirty trench coat.
So it would have to be a fox.
-
He breathed a sigh of relief as a beautiful red slinked nervously towards the small pyramid of invertebrates he had created. Its whiskers twitched in the air. The fox had nothing to fear from humans, not those who obeyed the law, but the city-living animal still retained some of its natural dignity – the finely tuned senses of a creature designed for a world of predators and prey. It had not yet succumbed to the utopia that humans had created, a place where aspiration and competition had been exchanged for unlimited leisure time and group hugs. The fox retained nobility.
It was confused, though, by the battle between its stomach and its brain. The artificial intelligences had been able to convince the dolphins and the whales to turn vegan, but the minds of other beasts were not yet open to them. Society’s solution had been an appeal to laziness – an attribute to which species seemed no barrier. Most city-living animals ate nothing but the vat-grown meat substitutes placed cleverly by algorithms to prevent them from hurting one another in needless competition. It worked most of the time. No animal was so noble as to prefer a hunt over effortless indulgence.
The worms were squirming. That was the problem. To the fox they smelled good; they smelled like food. Too few centuries had passed for the beast to lose that intuition. But the worms kept moving, and in the fox’s mind, food did not move.
Foxes don’t have minds, the man in the trench coat reminded himself. He looked deep into the creature’s eyes to remind himself that there was nothing there to see.
That was hard, even for him. Most people didn’t consider such things any more. If something moved, displayed emotion and looked cute, people were more than happy to assume it was a person. The way the world was going, it wouldn’t be long before the electrocabs had rights. Then the jovial pleasure-walls in the men’s lavatories. But the man in the trench coat knew his history – the hidden things they didn’t teach at school. In the darkest corners of the web he had discovered the secret histories of how the progressives had slowly changed the meanings of words like person, intelligence and empathy, until the whole morality of society had been bent to their way of thinking.
That was how he had met The Group.
The fox took the bait and turned its back on him. It began to gorge. Gripping the haft of his mop how he imagined his ancient ancestors had grasped their spears, and hunched low, he crept from his hiding place. Foxes are stupid, he told himself. There's no way...
Less than half a step taken and the fox hunched and bolted for the safety of the street. With a scream of frustrated rage the man hurled his mop like a javelin, only to watch it bounce harmlessly off a wall. The man in the trench coat glared in rage at his unbloodied, useless hands.
What have we become? he asked himself.
-
The man in the dirty trench coat sat at the back of the secret room above the garage and waited for the happening to begin. The date had been chosen well. The Omnigender Frisbee World Championship was showing on pay-per-view. Tonight the crowds gathered around illegally hacked view-screens would number in their billions.
“Where’s Roberto?” he sullenly asked the group’s leader, wondering what the lucky bastard might have run over this month.
“He’s not coming. I think he’s getting nervous.”
“Nothing to eat then?” asked the man in the trench coat.
The leader winked. “Never mind that." He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "We’ve scored some Attenborough.”
“No fucking way.”
“A data heist by a man in Breslau. BBC and National Geographic, unindexed. He downloaded the science and nature content off the restricted archives the day before the UN had it all wiped. I paid by the minute. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit I had to sit through, outer space and volcanoes, but mixed in with that all of that shit – some pure Attenborough. Durrell too."
The room fell into reverential silence as obsolete two-dimensional images began to flicker across a wall. The man in the trench coat feared disappointment. Watching penguins affectionately rubbing beaks to the strains of sentimental music was little different to the transspecies empathy sessions he had endured at school. But then came the shocking glimpse of a broken egg shell, a dribble of bloodied yolk hanging over its side. An illicit frisson shot through the room.
The next image was of savannah. Some of the group rose to their feet in anticipation. A pair of lions stalked the long grass.
The lions closed in. The man in the trench coat put his hand into his mouth, and tasted the salt of his skin. He probed tongue with his fingers, then the inside of his cheeks, felt intense pleasure at the soft resistance of his flesh.
The lions attacked. His eyes widened in awe at the sight of bloodied tooth and claw. He drew blood from his own hand. The group began cheering the predators on. One lady, frenzied by excitement, picked up her chair and smashed it to splinters on the concrete floor.
As the lions made the kill he clenched down harder, yelped as his teeth pierced his knuckles, and let a warm trickle of blood run down the back of his throat.
Then he stood involuntarily, swollen with life. Exhalted.
“This is living,” he screamed.
THE END
© A.M. Steiner 2018