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Asian American Speculative Fiction

It was December 2066. It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. I was 14 years old and my mother was driving me to my father’s house in rural Wisconsin, outside of Madison. There was no way I was going to spend the obligatory Gift Exchange and New Year’s holidays with him again. 

Last year instead of getting me presents, he smashed my guitar against the fireplace then put the mangled remains of it as well as the notebook where I kept my musical scribblings into the burning hearth. “That’s about as good a use as you’re going to get of those things, Abbey Zhang,” he had said. “No offspring of mine is going to waste his life composing songs about high school angst and pubescent hormonal fixations. You’re better off becoming a raiser of cage-free chickens, like your old man. There’s dignity in that profession. ‘Early to rise, to pluck from the dawn hens their golden-yolk prize,’ was your grandfather’s favorite refrain. It should become yours.”    

I couldn’t bear the thought of spending another two weeks on my dad's pasture chicken ranch, waking up before the light of day, feeding hens and harvesting their eggs, while the man who wanted to kill my adolescent musical dreams loomed over my shoulder. So, as I was sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s car and as she drove at approximately fifty miles an hour on a two-lane highway in the waning hours of that cold, snowy day, I forcibly took hold of the steering wheel and turned it with all my might to her left. The hydrogen-fuel two-seater crossed the lane into opposing traffic and we crashed head-on into an older model electric vehicle, the kind that were still common when China had not yet occupied the country for peace-keeping purposes.

My relationship to mother wasn’t ideal either. Although she never complained about my music, she did complain about my friends and my conduct at school. She was a drinker, and sometimes the guys she’d bring over from her nights in the town’s bars would get rough with her. Some nights she’d become hysterical and ask what she had done to deserve such an ungrateful, troublesome son and such a miserable life, more generally. 

Although the Chinese were real law and order types, even they couldn’t control the kind of trouble that found a lonely woman who was also a single mother and given to drink. On more than one occasion, after a night at the drinking holes, she’d told me how I, Abbey James Zhang, wasn’t really her son, that I had been born of her loins, but that I wasn’t her flesh and blood. Even though I didn’t bear much of a resemblance to either of my parents, I didn’t know what she meant. I would only find out when my face finally began to take on the adult contours of Morris James, the grind music star clone whose genome I possessed.  

It was a freezing December, but I still got out of the car and started tossing money out onto the road. Money was only really used by people involved in the underground economies: low lives and recently arrived immigrants. The low lives used cash because they didn’t want to leave trails of digital currency linking them to suspect citizens known to sell drugs and outlawed weapons. Recently arrived immigrants who hadn’t received the government’s newly nationalized banking app also made use of the aging low-density polyethylene bills that had stopped being produced two decades ago, after the Chinese occupation. I had money because I used to help my high school buddy, Hank, peddle black market synthetic drugs like LSD, MDMA and ketamine. The Chinese had really cracked down on sales and use of illegal drugs, and I risked getting thrown into juvenile reeducation camp until my 18th birthday for helping Hank, but I used the money to buy stuff at garage sales in the Latino barrios where some residents still didn’t possess means for electronic transfers. One of the things I had bought was the guitar my dad had smashed and burned.  

While I tossed plasticized bill after plasticized bill of the multi-hued hundred-dollar denomination currency, printed with the face of Barack Obama, onto the highway, I loudly shouted the lyrics of “Heathens” a song by one of my favorite millennial bands, 21 Pilots that had been covered by All, a band from the 2050s. It was one of the songs that hadn’t been banned by the Chinese who had imposed decency laws regulating cultural production.  All music that made explicit mention of sex, violence or drugs had gotten the governmental axe.  A concerned passerby driving a Great Wall hydrogen fuel coupe slowed to a crawl, rolled down his window, asked me what I was doing, and when I just kept on singing, he stopped and started picking up the old currency. Another passerby must’ve called the police, because not five minutes after I had caused the accident, a Madison Community Surveillance hydrogen hovercraft landed at the accident site.     

The Community Surveillance monitors found my mother unconscious in the driver's seat. Our airbags hadn't deployed and she had passed out upon impact with the steering wheel. I told the monitors that she was abused by a boyfriend and that if they looked for evidence of abuse on her body, they would find it. While the bystanders who had stopped to help looked on and reported what they had seen, I contemplated my options: either being taken to my father’s where I would be subjected to his sermonizing and paternal cruelties, or doing something rash to avoid transport to his torturous poultry-raising dominion. I made a lunge for one of the monitors. They quickly subdued me and after my mother had come to, she tearfully told the monitors that I wasn’t her son, that all they need to do was run a DNA scan to discover that the little demon didn’t belong to her. The monitors took me to a behavioral crisis unit for adolescents.

After I had been processed by the Madison Youth Behavioral Health Authority and given a DNA scan, I was shown to my room. There I met Dwindle, a lanky seventeen-year-old who told me he had been brought to the crisis unit after his parents had called the Community Surveillance Agency and told them that their son, who neither regularly took his meds for depression nor attended state-mandated therapy for anti-social personality disorder, had absconded. Dwindle was picked up by the monitors after being caught shoplifting in a gritty part of town. 

As we exchanged small talk typical of newly acquainted behaviorally-troubled teens, he told me that he’d been in and out of behavioral crisis wards since the age of twelve. Shortly after we had given each other a glimpse of our dysfunctional lives, Dwindle tossed a small bundle of pills, tightly wrapped in cellophane onto my bed.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Smell it,” he said.

The nugget-sized package smelled of feces.

“Smells like shit,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s because I keistered it when I was changing out of my street clothes and into the crisis unit uniform.” By “keistered,” which was pronounced like “key” and “stirred,” he meant he had surreptitiously hidden it in his anal cavity so that crisis unit staff wouldn’t confiscate the contraband. “It might smell like shit, but that right there is the shit that’s going to let me and you to get our kicks while we’re locked up in this hell-hole.”

The purple gelatinous pills didn’t look like any of the kind I had helped my high school black marketeer friend, Hank, peddle at high school and on street corners.

“It doesn’t look like Molly,” I said.

“Molly’s for idiots looking to experience love artificially,” said Dwindle. “We live in times when the likes of me and you are an endangered race.” He was referring to the fact that combined nuclear war in Europe and the epidemic spread of rapaxia, a virulent and extremely deadly disease that affected people of Northern European descent, had decimated light complected populations on the planet. No one was sure if rapaxia had evolved on its own or developed in a biological weapons lab. I was only partially white: my maternal grandfather was German and my paternal grandmother was Irish. Both my parents were half-Chinese, I wasn’t subject to rapaxia’s ravages, only people with red or blonde hair and blue or green eyes were, but I nevertheless harbored a fear that I could fall victim to its ethnocidal contagiousness.

“Love is for losers," declared Dwindle. "That substance you hold in your mortal hand is Moxy, and Moxy’s gonna change your life. It’s gonna make you want to kill something. It’s gonna make you see things, make you hear voices that’ll reveal the true meaning of your life. It’ll help you understand who the tormented soul that aches for meaning underneath your skin really is.”

Sure enough, seconds after we took the Moxy, I felt a surge of adrenalin that made me feel like I either wanted to fight or break something. Dwindle started howling and encouraged me to do the same. The loud racket we made seemed to quell the violent urgings the drug elicited, but Youth Behavioral Health staff intervened. Both Dwindle and I attacked the intervening psychiatric technicians. They found the remaining Moxy, put Dwindle on another unit and me in restraints in a side room. 

While fastened with rubberized straps to the side room’s metal-frame bed, the drug-induced adrenalin rush died out and the hallucinogenic effects kicked in. The buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead began to grow louder until they sounded like the deafening hum of a nuclear power station. The subdued hiss of the climate control vent on the ceiling began to sound like a titanic respiratory system inhaling then exhaling. On the mattress next to my head, a lone ant, on some programmed mission to benefit its colony, unsteadily climbed onto my arm. I found its genetically-coded determination comforting, and when I focused on it, the distorted cacophony of the lights and vent died down.

As I followed the ant with my Moxy-influenced eyes, it began morphing: first into a larger thumb-sized ant, then a rhinoceros beetle, a tweeting canary, a belching blue-bellied lizard, a roaring golden mouse, and on up evolutionary changes in the taxonomic chain of being until it became a chattering capuchin monkey, then a Jiu wӗihύ, a nine-tailed, white spirit fox that my maternal grandmother, Jing, had told me about when I was younger.  My grandmother’s name in Chinese meant “quiet,” which was quite ironic, since she was given to excessive chatting about topics that usually never captured my attention for more than a moment or two.

Grandma Jing’s talks of the nine-tailed fox provided a distracting alternative to the monologues she would often give about her Han, or pure-blood, genealogy, about the days of the Chinese peace-keeping force’s occupation, and the need for Chinese to conduct themselves like exemplary global citizens, reflective of our nation’s recently established manifest destiny. She was fond of telling me, “Abbey, you must stop frowning all the time. Bad moods are contagious,” words that now this nine-tailed fox repeated to me as it sat on my chest and gently rose and fell to my breath.

“Grandma?” I asked the fox.

“No, I’m not Jing, Mr. Abbey Dour—walker on the Abbey Road, seeker of the Abbey door—but, Jiu Wӗihύ, here to show you the true way-hu,” said the fox with a sharp-toothed smile, it’s nine tails flickering. 

“A Jiu wӗihύ, here to show me the true way-what?” I queried, feeling both confused and entertained by the hallucination that seemed straight out of Alice in Wonderland, a book my mother had read to me when I was in third grade.

“Way-hu, as in ‘path’ and ‘hu,’ meaning ‘to call,’ ‘to cry,’ ‘to shout,‘ and ‘to breathe out,’ in two of your grandparents’ native Mandarin, Mr. Abbey Zhang, Sir Abbey Tao. I’m here to say nĭ hăo and reveal your true name. I am the cry of your past, that is also the echo of your future.”

I knew nĭ hăo meant “hello” and that the Mandarin, “hu” translated into the English “to yell.” But the word had additional significance for me. My freshman year, after Hank had turned me onto the rock music his Wisconsin-born grandfather had listened to, I had turned him onto the Hu, a turn of the millennium Mongolian folk-metal band that still had a large following amongst Asians of many nationalities. Grandma Jing couldn’t stand when I would listen to the Hu. She called them, “bard-barian descendants of Genghis Khan,” and when she did I would reply with an “Amen,” and a “mother may, I?” before turning the volume of the Bluetooth speaker up even louder. 

I could hear the Hu’s version of Metallica’s twentieth century “Sad but True” blare from the intercom speaker in the isolation room, which I’m sure the nurse’s station wasn’t playing for the patients, but then the growly vocals started coming from the nine-tailed fox’s mouth. “I’m here to tell you to sing,” the fox said in Mongolian, which even though I couldn’t understand, I nevertheless understood due to the effects of the Moxy. “No matter what your father, the guitar smasher and burner, the dream killer, tells you, you’re no bringer of evil. You’re a derelict bringer of hope, you’re a singer.”

“How can I ever be singer? Most of the time I wish I didn’t even exist,” I said to the fox.

It put its snout against my nose, winked one eye, then the other, then opened both eyes wide. “Eight of my tails represent a time you will cheat death,” said the fox, and after saying this, it ate one of its fluffy tails. “You’ve already cheated death once, last summer when your mother took you to California and you dared the turbulent commotion of the Pacific Ocean despite the red flag warnings. You barely had the strength to swim back to shore. I will keep you safe until my tails run out. Until then, we must remain perfect strangers.”

I managed to ask the fox what my real name was. He answered, “My time here is up for now, but you’ll find out soon enough.” As I tried to get the fox to answer additional questions, it started to chew at my restraints. With a brilliant lightning flash that momentarily blinded me and a rumble of thunder that faded onto my sobering eardrums, the effects of the Moxy wore off, and my now-sober eyes could see that a tall psychiatric technician with a cleanly shaven head, full, graying beard, and blue eyes was unfastening the tethers that tied me to the bed. Behind him an attractive Asian woman with a white physician’s coat, a clip board, and a brass name tag that read “Dr. Bennet,” said “Abbey Zhang, there is someone important on a holophone who wants to meet you.” Holophones, that used hologram technology formerly confined to a few 20th century science fiction films, had been introduced three decades ago and had made traditional teleconferencing obsolete. I had an unexpected, lumpy-throated hope the person projected by the holophone was going to be my father.

Dr. Bennet, who must’ve been married to a white man to have a name like that, walked me to her office, where the hologram of a dark-eyed, honey-skinned man with a pencil mustache sat with his legs crossed and the fingers of his hands clasped over his uppermost knee. “Hello youngster, my name is Charles,” said the man as he reached out an open hand for me to shake. I obliged and shook it, feeling the still unrefined plasma-hologram technology’s capacity for limited tactility. 

“Where are my parents?” I asked the Singh-o-gram.

“Your mother is recovering from the accident. The Community Surveillance monitors have deemed she is no longer fit to care for you. Your father demands I deliver you to his pasture chicken ranch. But those facts are neither here nor there. To be more exact about my name, it is Charles Ravi Singh,” said the hologram, “I’m an agent for a powerful media corporation, and I am also now your legal custodian.” The hologram took a corporate identification and electronic fund transfer card from his suit’s breast pocket and held it for me to see. I read his name on it as well as the name of 21st Century American Entertainments, a firm that possessed the rights to many of the more popular films, music and books of the 20th century. They also owned the copyrights to most celebrity clones. 

“You were given the name Abbey Zhang at birth, but that is not your true name. While your mother Alice birthed you, neither she nor your father, Lee, are genetically related to you. You are a genomic replica of the grind music star Morris James, and whether you like it or not, your genome, and therefore, your life and death, belong to the 21st Century American Entertainments corporation.”

The last James clone had committed suicide 49 days before my birthday. I was now fourteen, and although I know I didn’t bear much a resemblance to either of my parents, I didn’t think I bore much of a resemblance to James until the moment Singh mentioned I was the replicant of the grind star. As Charles Ravi Singh turned to speak to Dr. Bennet about my impending release, memories of my barely adolescent life flashed before my eyes, of my parents’ dysfunctional ways, of my only high school friend, Hank, and his pills, of my grandmother complaining about the Hu, of my foolhardy swim in Malibu Beach, of the white, nine-tailed Jiu wӗihύ, whose words had made me stop wishing for death. Before I once again started listening to the conversation between Dr. Bennet and my new legal guardian, I wondered about what my other seven brushes with death would look and feel like.  

March 14, 2023 20:07

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30 comments

Zack Powell
05:27 Mar 30, 2023

Holy moly, this was packed with a loud of groundwork and answers for the previous Morris James installments. Lots of things formally addressed that I had questions about previously: The Moxy, Charles Singh's initial introduction, Morris James (the new iteration) before he made it big. And the great thing is that when one question is answered, there's another one that we have future installments to look forward to uncovering: the Jiu wӗ ihύ mystery, Grandma Jing, Abbey's parents, and more. What's very interesting to me is the plotline about ...

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Helen A Smith
17:08 Mar 29, 2023

Wow Mike! You’ve got it all going on here. I found it painful reading about the father’s attitude to the guitar playing and the messed-up mother. It was well conveyed. Incredible that you managed to fit so much into the word limit and took the reader on this immersive journey. I couldn’t help wondering if you plan to develop this dystopian/sci fi tale into the wider experience of a novel? There is so much here.

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Mike Panasitti
18:27 Mar 29, 2023

Thanks for reading, Helen. I would definitely like to produce a novel based on my Morris James stories. Reading comments from contributors to Reedsy keep me motivated to write it.

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Helen A Smith
19:33 Mar 29, 2023

I think you should.

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ML David
01:30 Mar 23, 2023

This seems like the first several chapters of a novel jammed into a short story. I especially liked the potential in the story of genetic “ownership” of people by corporations and what that could mean for future human beings. I’d read a novel about that. What I would love is to be allowed, through the story, to simply exist in this world you created. I would love the narrator to assume we are part of this world and already know everything. You tell us a lot as the writer. You describe everything from the history of the world, to family dyn...

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Mike Panasitti
20:51 Mar 25, 2023

Thanks for reading, ML. There is significant backstory to “Atlas Rises.” It is the latest installment in a series that began with a tale called “The 8th Iteration.” You have an interesting author’s bio and a unique voice. I’m on the other side of the mirror: a diagnosed schizophrenic with a style that is perhaps a bit exposition heavy. Welcome to the Reeds community. I look forward to reading more of your material.

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ML David
17:16 Mar 28, 2023

That’s probably why you’re so creative! Mental illness runs in my family, so it’s a subject I’m passionate about and could talk about for hours. Especially the strength and creativity that can come with it that other people tend to overlook. Thank you so much for the feedback. I’ll have to check out the rest of Atlas Rises.

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Basil McCulloch
12:53 Mar 21, 2023

Awesome story! I was hooked!

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Basil McCulloch
12:53 Mar 21, 2023

Awesome story! I was hooked!

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Graham Kinross
00:03 Mar 20, 2023

Lots packed into this. A chinese occupation felt like a future version of The Man in the High Castle, where Japan and Germany split America between them after winning WW2. Don’t think it would go so well for China though, it needs its soldiers to suppress its own people. Sending them abroad would leave them unguarded. The genetic warfare stuff is interesting. That reminds me of The Windup Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi which I think I’ve recommended to you before. Targeted genetic viral warfare would be horrific. Cool to get back to Morris James. ...

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08:45 Mar 19, 2023

Crazy story. All over the place. But written with such compulsion and depth I just couldn't "put it down." Really don't know what to make of that, other than perhaps it's the third chapter of a fifty chapter novel. But I read it. And would gladly read more...

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Mike Panasitti
15:02 Mar 19, 2023

Kinda dense material, I know, but much thanks for reading and commenting, Marcus.

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08:06 Mar 19, 2023

Abbey Zhang is a very interesting character. Your imagining of a future world under 'Chinese peace keeping' is an interesting speculative future. It's definitely a possibility with the 1930s like saber rattling political mania the world is in now. And Wisconsin, yay! I spent a year in school in Madison, definitely a different mood in places north from there. I also liked the subplot of rock music that's threaded through this, worked really well to make it relatable.

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Delbert Griffith
09:58 Mar 16, 2023

The return of the Morris James saga! WooHoo! You packed about ten stories into one, my friend. Futuristic government control, dystopian society where clones are owned, community surveillance monitors/government thugs, and a passing reference (I think) to Kurt Cobain. Everything here feels A-Clockwork-Orange-ish. Everything feels symbolic. Everything is an allusion to something else. Fucking masterful work, Mike. This could be a series of novels. You have so much to work with here, and so many issues to explore (and eight lives remaining) ...

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Mike Panasitti
15:20 Mar 16, 2023

Thank you, thank you, indeed, for the accolades, Delbert. If a reference was made to Cobain, it was largely unconscious, since Morris James is both a chimera of the various 27-clubbers and is also his own beast, altogether. I'm grateful you took the (perhaps painstaking) time to read this one. I'm hoping to pull all the strings together, if not in a novel, at least in a longer short story. Take care.

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Michał Przywara
20:59 Mar 15, 2023

Damn, that's a loaded story! A lot going on. First off, we have teen angst and an overbearing government dystopia. And what's the cure? Music, of course :) And it's curious that Abbey is drawn to music, just as Morris originally was. Does this mean there's a genetic component to it? A kind of predestination? Or maybe 21st Century American Entertainments adds something to the mix to ensure the product comes out correctly. Plus, even though this is a piece very focused around a character, we do get glimpses of an interesting view of the ...

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Jim Firth
10:39 Mar 15, 2023

A truly Panasittian story :) Abbey having no real connection to his parents and subsequently breaking away to find out that he is an iteration of a grime star is a cool way to set up a potential series. I loved the hallucinogenic parts in the youth behavioural facility with the ant evolving into the nine tailed fox. What a visual that was. And you've done it again with the brilliant 'wrap up' at the end, distilling a complex story and leaving us wanting more. We really want to find out what the other brushes with death are going to be, ...

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Wendy Kaminski
23:57 Mar 14, 2023

Incredible, Mike! I think this is your best work yet, in terms of complexity and absolute draw. Agree with everything Deidra said, and more. One possible fix needed: "if they looked for evidence of abuse on her body, they would." (find it?) Will definitely be reading this again to see the great stuff I missed in this jam-packed gift!

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Mike Panasitti
10:55 Mar 15, 2023

Thanks for reading this rather densely expositional story. I'm glad you enjoyed it despite the complexity. Also, I'm grateful for your eagle's-eye editorial find. I didn't write the story we corresponded about, but I'm hoping that one will make an appearance in some speculative or science fiction format that readers across the spectrum will be able to relate to. Take care, Wendy.

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21:09 Mar 14, 2023

MIKE -- this is a jammed packed carnivale of futuristic fantasy. I feel like I just walked through the Louvre in 5 minutes -- what's that? look at this? Ooo! So much to mine here. If you just used this as an outline, you'd have an entire series. I have so many questions...which is good! I want backstory on everyone and everything WOW. WOW. WOW. I love how you just casually mention that China's invaded...oops...I mean "occupied the country for peace-keeping purposes." Some things never change: “No offspring of mine is going to waste his ...

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Andrew Fruchtman
16:24 May 06, 2023

Nicely rendered future. I wanted more story at the end.

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Sonny Red
05:47 Apr 17, 2023

Nice story Mike, it's a little relatable for me having sort of an abusive upbringing. I also thought the story was quite funny, I don't know if that was what you were going for, but either way great job.

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L M
08:54 Apr 16, 2023

Keep going Mike, i miss your stories.

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Mike Panasitti
17:52 Apr 16, 2023

Thanks, L M. I'll be back at it before too long.

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L M
23:21 Apr 17, 2023

Cool, been busy?

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Mike Panasitti
00:08 Apr 18, 2023

Busy getting in trouble (after a trip to NYC), and out of trouble: Case dismissed! A bout of anhedonia gave me something to be concerned about for a couple of weeks, but I'm hoping all the experiences will translate into entertaining writing. Thanks for your support, L M.

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L M
21:57 Apr 26, 2023

Youre welcome

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L M
00:11 Apr 03, 2023

I like the alternative history stuff here and the drugs stuff is heavy.

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Unknown User
23:41 May 18, 2023

<removed by user>

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Mike Panasitti
11:53 May 19, 2023

I visualized the guitar as just a cheap acoustic, but having Abbey's father smash a Strat would be much more traumatic. Thanks for reading and commenting, Joseph. Your acclaim makes me think I'm not entirely delusional for considering this story one of my personal favorites. Take care.

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