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

Marx said that people create their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing. However many times I overwrite my thoughts and gestures, my history is written in this body. The form into which I have been compelled appears to have been freely chosen by the True Essence Incarnate: Hirsute as a 19th century German philosopher, yet with full breasts and hips. My bio-engineered implants were synthesized in the same Lehman College labs where ersatz steak and bacon are grown for the carnivores on the Council; Thawratullah must have found an incubator on the black market. Hir penis is circumcised but otherwise intact, the scrotum baggy with stray, undyed white hairs, the only outward sign of hir advancing age. Yes, I got that close a look. The perfect synthesis, so they claim. I got my orders: To mimic Thawratullah’s corporeal engineering. It was not pleasant: Nanoactuators dusted into every follicle, t-shots strong enough to stop my heart and leave me convulsive, aggressive, priapic and masturbatory.

We all have to sacrifice for the future we wish to create.

There was never the expectation of perfection. How could there be? As far as we can tell, Thawratullah was born Ahmed Abdullah ash-Sharqi to a pair of Egyptian revolutionaries nine months after a Tahrir Square hookup. They fled to Astoria with their kid after the second coup. That’s about all we know about hir early childhood, but it’s enough to tell me that zie would always be darker-skinned, and hairier, than a Eurasian ladyboy like me ever could become. The point was not to impersonate hir, but to emulate the Essence as so many of hir followers already had.

Fewer attempted to emulate hir Consort: Born female-bodied, zie had been infibulated and had breasts removed, seeking to become a Body Without Organs. (Though the overt doctrine is pure Feuerbach, the Church’s secret rites have more than a bit of Deleuze to them.) One could never truly become a BWO oneself, however many modifications one had—it was the desired end state of Human Species-Being, a quivering flux of differentiated energies. Modifications and transitions were not required of church members. I encountered many a cis-body in the ceremonies. But humanity, they believe, becomes God by transforming itself: It does not surprise me that many of my people have found their way into their ranks.

One’s second visit to a ceremony is more confusing, to the new initiate, than the first. The Church teaches that familiarity is the opposite of Love: By recognizing another person as family, friend or acquaintance, one sets them above the species as a whole, and closes off the possibility of respecting their coming transformations. One must always greet a person anew, with the same effusive welcome as the first time. They are political enough to accede to social norms in their external activities, but in the sanctuary—a Bushwick warehouse—one will always be greeted by each body with an embrace, perhaps a kiss, and the same greeting: “My love! Do you feel the God?”, with no differentiation between new recruits and old lovers. Names are used, but beyond the security check at the entrance, it becomes taboo to ask them.

The meeting begins in a way that would be familiar to any activist in the Unity: Church emissaries report on the outcomes of their assignments in as dry, quantitative a tone as any of our requisitionists. Yet whereas we have retained the impractical habit of retaining a minimum level of clothing regardless of weather or climate control malfunctions, the officiants will disrobe in the midst of the meeting with no apparent erotic intent. Since the space ends up as crowded as the 7 train in the 4 a.m. rush, even in winter the body heat will eventually mount to a point where nearly all attendees have fully disrobed, leaving only piercings and Bioelectrical Data Implants attached. On those many summer days when the temperature crests 37 Celsius, the disrobing is almost immediate. The BDIs allow participants to silently communicate propositions, consent and demurrals without interrupting the flow of speech. There is no decorous inhibition on initiating such assignations, so it is not uncommon to experience a bit of ass-play while listening to a droning enumeration of speeches given, contacts made, greetings proffered, combats won and lost, and narrow escapes from the militia. The only restriction is that one must remain silent, out of respect for whoever is speaking.

Nor do they refrain when Thawratullah rises for hir sermon. If anything, pairs become threesomes, groups become clusters, and the vigor rises until the conclusion, which is always, “Comrades, unite in becoming God! The Body Without Organs!” A casual observer might assume that Thawratullah had just stimulated the multiplying contacts and commanded the ensuing orgy. Rather, it is a dialectic: Zie times and modulates hir speech in response to the BDI signals from the Church members in the room. The difference between membership and mere contact status is that members must allow Thawratullah unrestricted access to their BDI signals. Hir relationship to the officiants is not that of a commander switching on a squadron of drones, but a conductor leading an orchestra. Only after the sermon do the worshippers break out in the crescendo of moans, gasps and expostulations one would expect.

That was the most exhausting aspect of this assignment: For my dissimulation to work, the IT commissariat needed to develop forms of encryption so advanced that its presence could not be detected by Thawratullah’s consciousness or hir dedicated processors. The time when I should have been sleeping, I had to keep my implants active so the programmers could read the traces of Thawratullah’s probes and enhance the encryption. Yes, they had me under sedation, but the sleep one has under sedation, still connected, is not like biological sleep: It is an otherworldly dream from which one cannot awake even in horror. I wish I could tell you what those dreams were like, but the last measure taken by IT security was always to wipe their traces from my conscious memory. I was left with only the ever-growing fatigue.

You who read this in the future have probably formed certain assumptions about what the sex was like, and those assumptions are likely wrong. The Church meetings were not spaces without taboo, but spaces in which the taboos we have inherited from the bourgeois past and before have been consciously overturned—and others put in their place, just as consciously. Among the new taboos was one against ejaculatory orgasm. This imposed a particular restraint on those of us born male-bodied—and, in my case, not yet as fully transitioned as I would wish—as well as on those female-bodied persons prone to squirting. The ideal put in place of phallic climax was that of the “Thousand Plateaus.”

The long-time members of the Church had developed certain breathing and meditational disciplines to this end, and over the duration of the assignment I picked up a few of them. Drugs also helped: I ended up rummaging through the requisitioned stocks of the pharmacies and found an old-fashioned antidepressant called duloxetine that helped me postpone. More important, though, was finding one’s own ways of engaging libidinally without exploding. For example:

My nipples are more sensitive to digital or oral stimulation than they had been before my transition began. The first member of the Church to discover that was surprised to see my eyes roll back into my sockets.

The raking of teeth or nails against the inner crook of my elbow sends a shiver through my entire body.

There is a ligament to the right of my scrotum that connects my groin to my inner thigh; when it is nibbled in just the right way, I melt like an ice cream shop in a brownout.