Eric Stever - Non Metallic

A book by Kurt Vonnegut that features time-travel is not science fiction. For him, time-travel is a device with which he can alter the narrative structure (and maybe, the short non-linear scenes matched his writing style of making each page perfect before moving to the next one). A book by Vernor Vinge that features the exact same time-travel technology, will absolutely be science fiction. He will explain to you how it works. He will develop a societal response to the technology. He will be wondrously thorough. So they’re starting with the same lumber, but building different things. Vonnegut builds an ornate cuckoo-clock, Vinge a museum of anthropology.

Instead we can say that genre exists as the expectation of the reader, prior to reading the book. Genre expectation is derived from everything about the book: The font on the cover, the cover art, the author’s name, how the book was located by the reader, the theme, the gender of the main character, the setting, the percentage of dialog vs. head-butting, and everything else, will influence this expectation. In many ways, genre is like an electron: you can’t ever pin it down exactly. You can only say it is generally in this location, for part of the time. But really you can’t be sure.

So what does this have to do with superheroes? Nothing. But I’ve convinced myself I can call this a fun(slash) near-future (hyphen) science fiction story. Also, this superhero doesn’t wear pants.

Bob-Ten allowed the eyeless human guard to reach below his handmade skirt and shackle him to the rest of the prisoners. He could break the chains (just barely), and had done so once, had overpowered the guards and escaped… and to what? A dark apartment that smelled of rotting food? Smiling accusations framed on the wall?

Instead, Bob-Ten had shuffled back to Cubicle 16, in Walmart Prison #3, to work it from the inside. Ideas of revolution floated just past his mental horizon. Somehow it would work, he thought, but all he could envision was the fighting.

So Bob-Ten plugged away at it, replacing his brother’s brilliance with his own appealing simplicity. Three weeks of hushed conversations and bribes would come to fruition tonight.

But the woman was ruining it for him.

“Come with us, or I’ll tell them about you,” Bob-Ten whispered, after the guard had moved down the line of prisoners, fastening each to the chain. How could she back out now?

Bob-Ten scanned Cubicle 16, his eyes darting from its walls of soft grey fabric to the linoleum flooring, scarred where the prisoners had tried fires. The prison was an old Walmart, its maze of white pipes on the ceiling turned black from smoke, the shelves pushed against the exterior walls, and stripped of anything useful. Out of the corner of his eye, Bob-Ten saw a blur of movement, and knew he had her.

“Come with us—”

“Do you know why the Optonians stole all of our clothes?” the woman asked, an edge to her voice. She stepped away from the cubicle wall, and was visible to him. Her hair still shone like silver around her sharp angular features, but her skin-tight suit had been replaced by the simple red sweater and Carhardt overalls she had tricked another slave into handing over. When she was first captured, she’d begged him not to tell the Optonian guards about her abilities. And she had tried to find out how he knew, how he could see her, when others couldn’t. But her hypnotic tricks didn’t work on him.

The woman answered her own question. “It is symbolic. They hope to weaken us, to show our frailty. Everything is a weapon to them.” She smiled at this great truth.

“We need your help,” Bob-Ten said, ignoring her lesson. “Mentissa, please. You promised.” He twitched his hand-sewn skirt made of curtains, smoothed his bath robe, which he had tucked into his skirt to conceal his protruding belly. A slob of a hero, Mentissa had called him once, and now a slob as a slave. But that slob had stopped her from destroying the Lago City Memorial Bridge three years ago.

She still has a grudge against me, that’s why she’s acting this way . And he couldn’t trust her.

“Such a waste of my powers,” the woman, Mentissa, said. But she stepped into line with the rest of the slaves, and with a twitch of her hand the latch fastened around her.

The Optonian guard, a Sightful, looked up, his surprise shown in an open lolling mouth. The Khaganate took out the human’s eyes as part of the transference, but the guard could still see with the help of those pulsing white nodes on either side of his head. The guard recounted the line. Twelve slaves were there, as always. Always twelve, even if there was eleven. They started for the exit.

Once outside, the twelve slaves and the guard moved across the red earth of the secondary pit. It was smaller than the main pit, and the larger machines had done what they could for now. Bob-Ten was surprised to see it was daytime, warm with blue skies. Slaves expect bad weather, he supposed, all night and gloom and lightning. The outside should match the inside. His brother would have had a quote for this, something to chew on, but like everything else, his brother had been torn apart by the war.

Bob-Ten had taken only a few steps into the tunnel when the plan started to go wrong. He felt a breeze pass through his skirt, then saw the slaves ahead of him stumble and fall. His heart sped up. Mentissa had escaped. She was—

“You’re supposed to wait,” he whispered. “We can’t take out the guard until we get past—”

“Stop whispering,” Mentissa said, her voice echoing off the walls of the tunnel. “I’m tired of all this sneaking around.” The other slaves turned their heads to look at her, slower than the guard who snapped his head in her direction. Bob-Ten saw the swollen white nodes pulsing in anger, saw the guard raise his weapon, saw three weeks of planning crumbling in one second of arrogance, and then… nothing.

The guard froze.

“I knew you could control them!” Bob-Ten gushed. He smiled, showing poorly kept teeth. “I knew you could do it Mentissa.”

In answer, Mentissa made the guard dance from side to side, flapping his arms and legs as if in seizure. She turned to the slaves who were now in complete shock, smiled at them as if she were a demented beauty queen, and then dropped the lot with a swipe of her hand.

Bob-Ten gasped. “Mentissa no! They’re just innocent—”

“They’re sleeping,” Mentissa purred. “Even the Sightful guard is sleeping. I didn’t know if I could control a Sightful to be honest, but they’re more or less human. Now then Bob, what’s your plan.”

Bob-Ten took in a breath and then recited it. “Well first I convince you to join me, then we go out to the tunnels together, then we overpower the guard.”

Mentissa fiddled with the clasps of her coveralls. Bob-Ten felt a tingle run through him that suggested she had tried something hypnotic, and failed again. Still, he hurried up.

“But here’s the genius part, are you ready?” Bob-Ten asked the slaves, the walls, anyone but Mentissa. “We don’t kill the guard. You hypnotize him, and we get him to take us back to the slave quarters, give us some weapons, and start a revolution there. Each one of us then frees more slaves, then more. And you know there’s other heroes in there too, I seen them flying around the Walmart at night sometimes, lights shining from their eyes. Once I think I saw the Weather-Master, but I’ve never met him so it could have been…” Bob-Ten cleared his throat. “Anyway, once we get it started, we’ll be like a wrecking ball. Smash ’em all up.”

He looked at her, but Mentissa had disappeared. Bob-Ten barely felt the large rock crashing down on the top of his head, a part of his body which was especially impervious to crushing blows. He turned to see the ruined face of the Sightful guard, leering at him.