SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

35. “I never laid a finger on Jared, or any of those boys,” he swore.

36. “How can I believe that? Where were you?” she asked. In her mind, his silence was sufficient indictment.

37. As Chloe backed her Subaru out of the garage and down the driveway, Aaron-T took a seat in his. Aaron-H slipped in under the closing garage door.

38. Aaron-T started the engine and opened the windows; Aaron-H hovered over the passenger seat. As alarms began to blare in the house, Aaron-T inhaled Aaron-H through his nostrils.

The Journal of Unlikely Cryptograph (Unlikely Story No. 11, February 2015)

As an undercover agent in the Sect Control Commission of the Secret Service, I cannot allow the reflexes developed in my earlier assignments to survive. A capacity to isolate and overwrite tics and habitual rhetoric is the sine qua non for this job. We are encouraged to elaborate these narratives between assignments, both as part of the overwriting process and in the hope that historians of the coming Collaborative Commonwealth will be able to reconstruct and comprehend the death throes of class society. Under the old regime, there was a Secret Service that protected the president, but also was assigned to rooting out counterfeit money. Our Secret Service protects the sovereign people by uncovering counterfeit ideas.

I was one of the first assigned to this role, but it was not my first form of service to the Council. After the Bronx Uprising and the establishment of our power in the outer boroughs, the fact that I was one of the few accountants—a notoriously conservative profession—to be a trusted member of Workers’ Unity meant that I was put in charge of requisitioning and allocation. I soon realized that this was a mistake; perhaps Lenin was right in his day to think that economic planning was like accountancy, but I could tell that to take account of second- and third-order impacts in feeding a city of eight million people under siege and facing catastrophic sea level rises, I would need second derivatives, probability integrals, eigenvectors and Markovians—things I had not studied since I was nineteen. My assignment then became to find all the mathematicians who had gone to work for the high-speed trading firms, who had become Wall Street billionaires and who thus were on the other side of the lines, and promise that not only would they not be strung up, but they could have comfortable lives solving far more difficult optimization problems than ever before.

Yes, I had to promise them some privileges, and no, that didn’t sit well with the rat-burger scrounging masses, or the Council. But it was surprisingly easy: Half of them had already run their models and figured that, one way or the other, we were bound to win. That was how I discovered my talent for clandestinity.

Some of my early assignments were dull. For example, because before the establishment of the Unity I had hopscotched around some small Trotskyist and Bordigaist groupuscules, I was asked to infiltrate—with the help of some reversible plastic surgery—the remnants of various Marxist groupings that had not joined us. The Badiouan post-Maoists misconstruing mathematical formulas to determine whether our Revolution met their standards for being called an “Event,” the Spartacist debates over whether our power was a “degenerated” or “deformed” workers’ state or still too indeterminate to say anything about, the five Chirikians who defined themselves as the sum total of the “proletarian milieu”—I reported that they posed no more threat to us than they had to the capitalists beforehand. We were determined not to repeat the totalitarian excesses of the past.

The traditional theistic religions posed little problem, either. Those clergy and congregants who were inclined to go over to the counterrevolution rarely bothered with dissimulation, and a surprising number of religions split along “social justice” or “liberation theology” lines in our favor. As long as we can restrain the church-burning excesses of Insurrectionalists, we have little to worry about from the god-believers. The only truly interesting conspiracy I uncovered from that corner was the multi-ethnic Chan Buddhist temple in Flushing that was an elaborate cover for a fascist, Chinese-supremacist coup plotting to take over Queens.

What we have found, however, is that the scientific outlook of a historical materialist is rarely taken on in full during the present struggle for existence. People pick up little bits of utopian impulse here, some propositions reduced to the level of slogans there, mix them up syncretically with the cultural detritus of the old regime’s slow decline, and sects that no one could have anticipated spring up like mushroom clouds after the Zionist Masada.

Sometimes they’re harmless. The strangest cult I ever had to infiltrate was the Marcia’s Witnesses. They were obsessed with Maureen McCormick, a twentieth-century actress best known for having portrayed a teenage girl named Marcia Brady on an insipid television program eighty years ago. My final report said that while they were undoubtedly backward on the women’s question, they were mostly harmless, and so no extraordinary measures of suppression were needed.

But not all the syncretists are quite so harmless, and that is why I just shaved off a beard after a sojourn among the Feuerbachians.

To be fair, that is not what they call themselves. The official name is the Church of God as Love. Those of us in the Unity who identify as Marxists have yet to shake the habit of associating ideologies with surnames. The public preaching of this group does not differ substantially from the ideas expressed in Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity : “God is pure absolute subjectivity released from all natural limits; he is what individuals ought to be and will be: faith in God is therefore the faith of man in the infinitude and truth of his own nature; the Divine Being is the subjective human being in his absolute freedom and unlimitedness.” Or as Thawratullah—the self-styled True Essence Incarnate—would put it: “You are God, you will be God, but only in the Revolution. The Revolution needs us to become the God we are meant to be.”

It’s not just that this sort of rhetoric is a distraction from the urgent tasks of the day. For all their talk of love and unity, it’s basically divisive. Feuerbachian street-preachers have been known to trigger brawls outside of churches, mosques and gurdwaras. Their evangelists sidle up to the more fuzzy-headed cadres in the Unity and distract them with grand discussions of the unity of body and spirit. And the more political operators have infiltrated our council structure to divert scarce resources into “educational” ventures tied to the Church.

Then there are the sex parties.

My transition was interrupted when the uprisings began. There were still plenty of backward elements in the Unity who didn’t recognize their own cis-privilege, who dismissed synthetic hormones as cosmetic, not worth putting on the pharmaceutical ration queue. It wasn’t my first faction fight, but in the meantime, even though my breast growth was irreversible, resurgent testes had put hair back on my face. With all the work to be done, there was hardly time for shaving or makeup, let alone electrolysis or lasers. I was the one who started the jokes about “Lydia the Bearded Lady.” This is not the body I had imagined, but it has been put to good use in the struggle: For the Chan assignment, I had to bind and pass as cis-male. Passing as cis-female with the Witnesses was easier, once I got my hormones back and a facial graft—they were so chaste, so obsessively focused on Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. I could have been more comfortable with the Feuerbachians—Thawratullah hirself is trans—but someone on the Council had a bright idea.