THE LAST COMMUNIST [Un mise-en-scène]

(Warning: Bad words, politics, violence)

[Outside, carrioncrows and sparrows gale out their evensongs, ancient honeyed melodies now become obsolete bitter-birdsweet lichsongs for long-dead Father Winter. An evergreen Yulemonth clambers over the corpse of November with the red-eyed fervor of a fascistic sucker-peasant serviceman, dragging its bloody tobroken body up over a bloody tobroken battlefield and skittering down amongst the trenches, servilely crawl-marching a mouth-foaming triumph for Summer Tyrant-King’s victory over all other yeartides won through sheer financial growth.

[But that loss was long ago. Today is today is today. An unexpected, long-unheard-of cold harr from a pale unseen sea whispers a chilly threat. Or an empty one.]

***

{TRANSLATED FROM THE ANGLOHISPANOMANDARIN}

-er, hard to say what to make of him when the techs had trundled him into my recovery-room and plopped him onto one of my beds. I’d heard some of the chatter on the matter about the ancient American revolutionary on the Overweb when it all drifted through my ears that morning alright but I was too coke-bereft from this latest all-nighter-no-access-four-hours’-sleep-combowombo to really care much, much less imagine it plopping onto my plate, but there I was.

He was a relatively young man. Tad younger than me. Thirty-five thereabouts.

Jealous of the beard. Thick wild grizzly mane-thing. But I pity a man with that hell of a hairline, his age, which is nowadays an especially violent dose of shite luck in this time of fetal gene-editing, but apparently unfortunately rampant back in the day, I’ve seen online.

Deffo fits that ancient image of the pre-postmodern futile Revolutionary, grizzled and chiseled, a hard face hewn of solid anger even fresh out of cryosleep, and yet still asleep!

An anachronism. From what I hear, even in his own time.

[The revolutionaire creaks awake soon after midday, when a beam of warmwinter early twilight peeks down from the windowhead and beats him on the eyes.]

Read the report. A rather miraculous case:- one-outta-twenty-five-chance kinda thing. Us scrubs at Saint Thunberg have been dumped with those old “cold cases” hehehe from that way-way-old cryosleep business from downtown, barely kept from defunction by sheer dint of will and capital. Read on the Wikiworld article outta curiosity, seems the revolutionaries from the February Dirtbag or Pervert Revolution or whatever had taken the thing over in response to one of their leaders, this guy, getting shot. Story said the revolutionaries had just happened to be in Brussels when he got sniped at, someone in the group had heard about the cryo-place, and to forestall his death, they went and threatened the employees into handing over a tube. And they did. And this is tech from way back in the day, so he’s one out of the four out of the three-hundred-and-ninety-five people that seemed to have overlived the process. And from the scans his was one of the two brains that seemed to be functioning, mashallah, it was just up to waiting and seeing how he’d work when awake.

“Aw, sssssshit.”

There we go.

“Wwwwwhere dafug-?” [He shot up in bed and stopped wincingly when he found his legs hurt too much, had too much a tangle of pipes piping chems into him, chems to get him walking again eventually.]

His old English dialect was sharp and hard on the ears but the Wyrm implanted in my ear helped me with interpreting because I’m just a little rusty right now, ke no ma? And speaking a dead tongue is always an eerie, uncomfortable thing. “Hello. I am Doctor Kadir, this is the Saint Thunberg Hospital in Brussels-”

[His words were slurred and tired beyond fatigue.] “Wha, ‘Ssssaint’ Thunberg? Youyou guys made that a thing? Fuggin’, cringy-asssss… Europoors. Progcaths. Liberals. Eh, wha’e’er…”

Neither I nor the Wyrm yet have any clue what many of those words meant but I simply nodded and went on: “Are you feeling okay? Aware?”

“Summin like tha.”

“Alright, can you tell me your name?”

“…Sergei Arkadjev.”

“Your birthyear.”

“Ummm… two… two-thousand-three.”

“Oh, wow, that’s like my jaddi- I mean, okay. Yep, that tracks with the report… age?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Your mother’s name.”

“Maiden or…?”

“We… don’t call it that anymore, it's insensitive. But her first name, please.”

“Look, what’s this all about? Are you with the fuggin’ reactionaries? I guess it’s a fitty-fitty with them to wake up with a gun to my head or like this, to lull me into a false relaxation, so-”

“No, no, that’s all done with, I’m happy to say. Belgium is an affiliate corporation within the greater Euro-African Coalition-Enterprise, Inc., not a backward polity like what you’re thinking. We mean you no harm, quite the opposite, in fact.”

“Dafuck?” His eyes blink clear, his eyes widen, he swallows. “The fuck? What is that. When did that happen. Europe, the EU, we’ve just taken Paris and Berlin, m-moving on to here to hi-hit the Hague-”

“Errrr… How should I explain…”

***

[Somewhere in Berlin, under the dim lights of the great shell being built above the slums below, in a rust-swath of dead Chinamerican corporate businesses that once held local hopes and dreams, a young girl shivers within a cold draft no one is prepared for, in the last free foodline in the whole Brandenburg area, amongst sullen and hateful shadowy gazes; everywhere else has taken to a subscription-model that’s 50 centimes more a month than what unser arme Mädchen here makes as a handmaid. Too unattractive on the main to sell her body like most of her friends, she’s tried that already, one Freier every fortnight at best, she knows where she’s at. Unbeknownst to most everyone here, this foodline, too, will soon fall to the new model, forced by the slavering maws of the taxman and the insurance-slingers.

[Someone passing by spits at the Turk behind her and it spatters into her hair instead. She shivers and tries her best to ignore it. The two men start screaming at one another, and the din unrests the line. At least they’re not hitting on her, she thinks as the shouts get louder and louder, as much as the thought also hurts. A torn poster, a pretty new one, actually, stretched over the slum-tenement across the street from the aborning riot- the poster originally covered several windows before its rending- with an image of two American-shaped women leaping into the air reads: BE AUTHENTIC // ENJOY BEING YOU // WE LOVE YOU // SPONSORED BY THE FDP AND TESLA GENETICS

[The stench of burning plastic, coal and oil stains the air.]   

***

[A hopelessness slashed across his face.] “So we lost. We lost.”

***

[The year is two-thousand-eighty-nine CE. The newer progressiver pope sings pop-songs at a celebrity drag-karaoke held in the latest apartheid-state. A cop beats a homeless person to death. Landlords have recently won all rights over their tenants and fetishists in animal costumes dance sensually in front of children at a certain school’s propaganda-rally for hyper-authenticity and jobs in the servile industries. A ten-year-old child is allowed to wear pink and a wig when he enters the silicon-mine for work, so he is cheerful today; the mine has hit its employee-diversity-quota as per the Chinamerican lady-director’s orders, and the child’s back shall give out at the age of thirty-three. The People™ throughout the world are largely bound to chairs and VR-units and feedingtubes, all the while providing base desk-labor or AI-computing-power between VR-orgy-seshes and fantasy-world-dives. Anyone who isn’t in VR is at IRL work doing nothing useful in particular. A cop beats a homeless person to death. The CEO of the Martian colony, the first human/woman on the planet in fact, proudly stands the flags of the Libre Federation of Chinamerica and Tesla beside her desk.

[Nothing has changed in sixty years, besides perhaps three perfectly healthy market-crashes and the exponential growth of profit-margins. It is all fluid-mechanical perfection.

[Everyone who could’ve changed the world was murdered en masse forty years ago, or was transmuted into parodies of themselves, t.i. perpetuating elements of the Worldwide Profit System. Bar one man in Brussels, who seems to have missed the memo.]      

***

I don’t really understand why he was that upset, to be honest. So he lost, sure, but that’s hardly a big deal with how wonderful the world has become in his absence, at least in my opinion. I mean, how else could I afford the newest Tesla if it weren’t for my steady investment portfolio? Definitely not from my job or my wife’s job, that’s for damn sure. But I decided against mentioning it, I didn’t want to run the risk of upsetting him further as that would go against company-policy.

…I still have the scars from the last time I accidentally did that.

Also I was just too tired to really care. “I don’t think I’m the most qualified to talk about what happened, it’s way before my time-”

[The old revolutionary creaked himself out of bed. The doctor almost moved to stop him from keeling over beneath the weight of his atrophied muscles, until he saw how the man barely had a limp.] “I imagine, if it’s as I fear, it’s the same time, just… stretched out and pinned taut, like an old bourgeois tart’s flesh.” [The revolutionary is a thing of iron will. He ignored the agony and weakness in his body and stood by and stared out the window, upon a world even greyer than the one he’d started in. A manicured lawn. Fancy-looking cars in the lot. The grass was half-dead and the cars still looked to run off petrol or some other burnt fuel. The city beyond shone from its crown of skyscrapers, which were enringed in gangrenous-black outgrowths at their feet. And there were no flying cars or jetpackers in the sky, but swarms of helicopters and remote drones chopping low over the city, constantly looking for something, someone.] “Tell me about what happened.” 

“…Right.” I pulled up the Wikiworld article about the revolution on my Wyrm's eye-display. “‘The Dirtbag Revolution’-”

“Heh. Of course they called it that.”

“‘…spearheaded by the New Revolutionaries led by Nahid Muhammad, Sergei Arkadjev, Else Gudmundsdotter, and Guang Chunfei, was an anticapitalistic, communist revolution that lasted from February 2034 to January 2042’-”

[The names stabbed him. Made his iron will creak.] “…that’s it? That’s as long as we lasted?”

“-‘which historians argue started in Bangladesh with the rise of the New Left Party in 2029, formed in the fallout of the noncooperation movement, and eventually spread through influence to the former United States, now the Libre Federation of Chinamerica, Great China, the Congo, the former Russian Federation, the Balkans-”

“I know all that, you scab, don’t read the top. Tell me how we lost.”

[A betrayal. A few weeks after Sergei’s freezing, a small but significant fragment of the movement’s footsoldiers had been still too far in love with the creature comforts of the capitalist system, and they wanted back into the Matrix where they could comfortably consume and masturbate without end once more. This fragment spilled every last bean to the new reactionary movement within the EU what would become the Coalition, in exchange for total amnesty after the revolution’s death.]  

“But Gay Pride is a national holiday now! It isn’t all bad, in that way you’ve won!”

[A smokescreen. A condescending pittance from the highers to their lowers. Naught of substance.]

[The revolutionaire turned away. Sneered back tears.] “…My wife. Is there anything on her. Marijke Arkadjev, or do Marijke van der Heide, that’s her maiden name. I took her from Amsterdam to Japan, a neutral state.”

[A warm smile from across the hall. His soul.]

You’d think a progressive like him would avoid what I just said is an archaic, insensitive word, but whatever. Again, I’m not gonna push the issue with a patient, I don’t want to go against policy. “Uh, yeah, I can click on your name, doo doo-doo, biodata… yep, right here. Marijke Arkadjev.” Husbandonymic. Typical, I guess. “Yep, looks like she stayed there for several years. Had your kid. Looks like you, so I’m sure he’s yours… Er…” I hesitated, but he was glaring at me. “She was later imprisoned for her activist work in Japan, …after the Chinese takeover of that country. She later died in prison of an unknown heart condition in 2053. But, hey, there’s a street named after her in Amsterdam!”  

[Sergei’s soul fades quietly into the dark.] “She… died alone? In prison? Without ever knowing about what happened to me?”

“Well, I don’t know about that. And I’m sure she was with other prisoners, the Japanese were like that, I hear.” Before the Chinese came.

“…And my son? Kim?”

[An unstained gaze from swaddling-folds.]

“Became a… post-office agent! Married a man named Leopold in 2056, says. Erm…” I chose to not to mention the rather… disparaging comment his son had left for his father. And how he suicided-by-cop in 2073. “But the past is past, you know? So many progressive changes happened because of you and your movement’s actions, too, you know?”

[Sergei whispered to himself, so the doctor couldn’t hear]: “Everything I’ve worked for. All my friends. Marijke, jailed till she died. Kim, with the shame of his ‘terrorist’ father.” [Aloud]: “And so no universal healthcare, I imagine, huh?” He flopped down on his bed like so much paper. [Bitterness and cryoliquid dribbled from the corners of his mouth.] “How in all fuck d'you expect me to pay for all this, then, you bourgeois schmuck?”

“Oh.” I was getting a little fed-up with the old-young man’s cheek and his strange words. I thumbed through the report on my eye-display, tried not to look at him. “Looks like… we took the funds from your group’s bank-account. I'll read the note here… well, uh, their Swiss account wasn’t frozen, ahem, so to speak, due to a host of legal loopholes, it was used to pay for your cryosleep and upkeep as well as for the awakening procedures. I mean, why don’t you use what’s left of it, go enjoy the Bharatiya restaurant downtown, go on and start a new life? I’m sure your former experience would make you an attractive employee for one of the world’s ten companies!”

You know, I still don’t know why he was still so upset when I left. All the progressive changes his kind ever wanted are here! He had all this money leftover in the bag! Anyone would be jealous of him, what he’s accomplished! This world was born of him!

***

[Chino-Americo-Russo Interpol Chief receives the message a few hours after the fact that the terrorist Sergei Arkadjev has awoken in Brussels. He leans back in his 100000-Euro office chair, appraising the memo on his tablet while his secretary appraises him down below. The Chief’s mouth waters at the thought of getting the sumbitch- his Chief’s father, the Chief before him, had been a lowly field agent at the time of the Revolution, and had run across whole continents to get all those dirtbags two meters under. And then when the revolutionaires' Brains, Arkadjev, was in his sights, his stupid little comrades put him on ice, which was somehow protected under local and international law. It’d be a “warcrime” to kill him, the pathetic paperfuckers from HQ'd bemoaned. Not that it stopped the newly-formed Coalition from slaughtering all Arkadjev's comrades like the pigs they were when the time came. “They never surrendered,” Dad had said with a nostalgic grin, “so they were free game. Hundreds of thousands of them. The most fun I’ve ever had.” And now, the Big Man himself is free game once more. The Chief gives a cheers to good ol’ Dad.

[By morning, the fascists in black exoskeletons are gathered at the hospital’s foot.]                       

***

“Look, I don’t know where he is. He just up and left. The cameras had been fucked with somehow and I barely just met the guy, so how would I know?”

[The doctor doesn’t know yet that in less than a year, Arkadjev and his motley group of aged Bangladeshis and Palestinians and young folk from the world over will kill some two-thousand politicians, celebrities, and capitalists at the World Gala in Bangkok, including the Premier of Greater Israel and Palestine, the Imperator of the New Russian Empire, the Pope, Indonesia's CEO-Caliph and the XO of Swartstone Hemispheric Holdings, alongside a host of fashion-designers, movie-producers, actors. The People™ gasp and shriek in horror when their internet goes out.

[Later, “reformed” comrades, many living in the lapse of luxury, will open the doors to their homes, only to find guns leveled to their foreheads.

[The doctor will see the news. See the glorious grin on the old revolutionaire’s face. And no, he won’t know what to think of it.]

“…I had nothing to do with it. I swear.

“…I have nothing else to say.

“…Please don’t kill me.”

***

[Further out, the last and first revolutionary celebrates over the burning flesh, with a spark alight and shining in the dark cavity of his soul, he laughs and abides with pleasure the roar of guns from afar and the bombs of nervegas and gunpowder, to meet them with more fire and joy than a summery mayfly fascist, be they uniformed all in bootlicker-black or with a happy corporatic rainbow badge next to a skull on their chests, could ever drum up in their empty soul. The revolutionaires sing to an unknown future yet again, with their heart prepared to do it again and once more and once more.

 [Winters’ ghosts dance to the merry tune of dead yeartides over the bodies and mock the Tyrant-King, and Summer indignantly sputters and declares “I HAVE WON! I HAVE ALWAYS WON! I AM ETERNITY!”

[“Maybe so,” the ghosts gale with wonder and amusement, “for now.”

[A cold harr blows through from a pale unseen sea, and a young girl shivers in the sudden chill.]