Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 7: Love Missile
Part 2: The Marriage Exception (Final Revision)
Part 2: The Marriage Exception (Final Revision)
25 august 2014...
As the Corporates fly into cleared-out Manhattan for their Spanner-plagued Acceptance of Steve Jobs and Apple into the United Corporations, Vice President Sarah Palin, Incorporated, announces that her divorce from Todd Palin is final. She is now free to marry whomever she wants. And she intends to marry him on September 11, the Day of the Patriot Martyrs, one of the high holy days on the religious calendar of Americanism.
The world press explodes with rumors of the groom. Is it another politician? a high-ranking Corporate baron? a celebrity (presumably not the tarnished Mel Gibson)? a European prince? one of the powerful Shepherds of the Church of America whose inquisition protects the Empire’s power? Jesus America Himself? The bookmakers are already making their bets.
As the Corporates fly into cleared-out Manhattan for their Spanner-plagued Acceptance of Steve Jobs and Apple into the United Corporations, Vice President Sarah Palin, Incorporated, announces that her divorce from Todd Palin is final. She is now free to marry whomever she wants. And she intends to marry him on September 11, the Day of the Patriot Martyrs, one of the high holy days on the religious calendar of Americanism.
The world press explodes with rumors of the groom. Is it another politician? a high-ranking Corporate baron? a celebrity (presumably not the tarnished Mel Gibson)? a European prince? one of the powerful Shepherds of the Church of America whose inquisition protects the Empire’s power? Jesus America Himself? The bookmakers are already making their bets.
7 september 2014.
tokyo. Hikki otaku Hiromatsu Fukuda hears his iPhone’s ringtone. The caller ID is that of Aya Shibata, the videogame character he married. Disturbed yet curious, he answers. A pretty teenage gaijin who looks exactly like nudefighter!Aya greets him wearing only a cheerful smile, waves at him, and sings “Hiro-nyaaaan! Moshi-moshiii!”
Hiro is shocked to see his beloved character suddenly reveal herself as real. “Dare—?” [Who—?]
“Boku wa maiwaifu yo.” [I’m your anime bride.]
“—Aya-chan?”
“Honto [I’m real]... Hiro-nyan.”
technosphere... “Hiro-nyaaan.” She’s a pretty little youko in a fluffed-out goth-loli dress complementing her fuzzy fox ears and tail and the barely pubescent physique she uses to lure Japanese perverts to their doom. Aya Shibata is a succubus. She drapes herself over her smitten victim’s shoulders and playfully nibbles his ear.
shibuya... In a crowded internet café, Hiro-nyan marries his love. Not the hard-boiled bujutsu-game nudefighter, not the lubricious dark elf terrorizing Gensoukyou — his new “maiwaifu” is loli youko!Aya Shibata.
At first it weirds her out. Then she is furious. At last, the real Shira contemptuously quips: “Otaku no baka.”
shibuya... In a crowded internet café, Hiro-nyan marries his love. Not the hard-boiled bujutsu-game nudefighter, not the lubricious dark elf terrorizing Gensoukyou — his new “maiwaifu” is loli youko!Aya Shibata.
At first it weirds her out. Then she is furious. At last, the real Shira contemptuously quips: “Otaku no baka.”
xbox field. The faith-mad zombies of the cult of America rush onto the pitch to line up in perfect formation, two by two, male and female, to join in perfectly eugenic matrimony. Sun Myung Moon, late Shepherd of Korea, industrialized marriage into mass spectacle; Shepherd Moon, the hater of Communism, communized it in a way that Stalin and Mao would approve and the Kims adopted. The Eugenics Institute rationalized the aristocratic tradition of arranged marriage to advance Galton’s science into the age of space conquest. With absolute faith that they are bringing into being the New Man, crusaders united to defend the grail of Corporatism against the passing of the great race and the all-destroying entropy of individual passion, one thousand Corporate aristocrats in battle formation advance across the sign of the X to be united in eugenically correct union by the savior of the American Union.
Her name is Princess Drusilla Anne Becket Thomas Thorndyke Wilkinson Brinkman Draper Pernell of Dictel, Incorporated, and she reigns over them as Supreme Shepherd of the Church of America in the American State of Cascadia. Upon the stage, before the altar, she stands before and above them as a living goddess: gleaming golden prophetic robes encrusted with glittering gems, beautiful harsh face artfully painted into an Egyptian objet de culte, golden locks architecturally braided atop her head and crowned with the spiked iron crown of Columbia, the Nation, eternal bride of Jesus America. Drusilla Becket, superstar: flanked by her top-hatted, leather-trenchcoated Patriot Metal acolytes Byron Scofield and Jeremiah Light, she appears before them as the Ideal made manifest, blinding all present who see her without the rose spectacles of faith. Behind her, a giant television screen projects the image of a slowly waving one-star American flag superimposed with the sacred Sign of the Dollar.
mudlark house. But four women watching Drusilla on the big screen see through her Emmy-bait costume and her deceptive mask of spiritual authority. They know her for the insufferable narcissist she is, these two couples cuddling nude on the couch, her four most implacable enemies: her estranged daughters Charlie and Desiree Richter-Thomas; their aunt Willa, Drusilla’s archenemy, whose personality alone can outshine the guru-queen’s mask; and her sister-in-law and lover, Hope Reston. “Oh my god,” says Charlie, “do you know how much money she’s putting into that?”
“Ohhh!” moans Desiree. “Mommie Dearest makes me wanna suicide-bomb that place into cinders!”
“Is that a Moonie marriage she’s pulling?” asks Hope.
“In finest Nuremberg style,” Willa deadpans.
Shira and Jennifer call them from Union Station. “Hey you guys,” Shira says, “you watchin’ the show?”
“Would we not?”
“Rumor has it Spanner’s planning a surprise ending.” She winks.
Jennifer grins. “Don’t change that dial.”
1 june 2013...
“No, you cannot!” shrieks Richard Becket. “It’s not possible, it’s not moral, it’s not...”
“Fair?” mocks Dr. Willa Richter-Thomas, his longtime enemy. “I thought that word wasn’t even in your vocabulary.” She waves around a copy of the United Corporations Charter.
The Chairman storms up to her and leans down into her face. Even at 182 cm (about six feet in the British Imperial units the American Empire still stubbornly uses), Willa still looks short compared to the two-meter-tall Chairman. Yet she isn’t the least bit intimidated, so she doesn’t lean back; his nose touches hers as he stares down into her face. He growls, “No, I won’t let you.”
She smiles and shoves the Charter up into his face. “Seems here, Dick, that there’s a loophole right here in your Charter that allows just this. I can easily get any lawyer to cite you the chapter and verse of it. But if you read your American Constitution, you’ll find that any treaty ratified by the Senate and signed by the President becomes the law of the land, in effect part of the Constitution itself. That, as you well know, includes the Eugenics Program. The loophole, which your CEO friends insisted on putting in, allows anyone who is Incorporated to take any mate she pleases, no matter how dysgenic. Therefore, to put it bluntly, there isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop me.”
Chairman Becket throws up his arms and storms off away from his onetime sister-in-law. After five ragged paces, he turns back to her, points at her, breathes heavily as he stumbles for words, and finally says, “You know I’ll change it back, Willa. I’ll make it right this time.”
“And then your entire Eugenics Program will collapse. Yet keep it the way it is, and you’ll have every Corporate princeling in the Cartel at your throat in no time flat. And so I have every right to marry my own daughter. I have absolutely no intention of ever letting your sick toadies have my daughter for any reason whatsoever. Eugenics Program or no Eugenics Program, I intend to protect my dear Jennifer from you and all your kind. And so I’m making her my wife, and then I’m going to make love to her every day we remain married. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
21 june 2013...
boston common. Willa Richter-Thomas’ wedding dress is simple, but Jennifer Blair’s is exquisite. Jennifer looks like the beautiful angel people have been calling her all her life.
Drunk with ecstasy, Jennifer says, “I do.”
The Mayor of Boston says, “By the power invested in me by the Commonwealth of New England, I pronounce you husband and wife.” The huge crowd bursts into loud cheers. Before the Mayor can say anything else, Jennifer throws herself into her mother’s arms, and they kiss passionately. Mother and daughter are now husband and wife.
Outside the festivities on the Common, Willa’s enemy, the Prophet Drusilla Becket Pernell of Dictel, Incorporated, leads a huge crowd of politically connected evangelicals, Minutemen, neo-Nazis, and “God Hates Fags” cultists in a massive riot. Vice President Sarah Palin herself and other prominent Conservative Revolutionaries walked here arm-in-arm with Reverend “God Hates Fags” in support of “morality.” (Willa:“Pop quiz: What do Corpos mean by ‘morality’?” Jennifer: “Sexual fascism based on [air quotes] ‘traditional’ marriage arranged by Cartel-approved eugenicists [sticks out tongue in disgust].”) But when one of the Minutemen tried to assassinate Willa and Jennifer and was shot dead by a police sniper, the whole crowd outside exploded into mob violence. Vice President Palin and her entourage fled in their stretch Hummers, leaving the rest of the conservative crowd to face the riot police. Before the people inside can go out and dance in the streets, the police must clean up the Corpo riot. There’s no love lost between the Imperial authorities and local police.
In the nineteenth century, “Boston marriage” was a byword for de facto lesbian marriage. Then in 2004, eight years before the coup, Massachusetts became the first state in the Union to legalize same-sex marriage, making the old slang term a legal reality. After the coup, as President Goldman Sachs & Company reconstituted the Confederacy on the Union’s ashes, one of its first decrees was to forcibly merge all the New England states and former Canadian Maritime provinces into one state of New England, in order to limit the liberal influence the “damn Yankees” could have over what was in effect a victorious Confederacy. The new “Yankee Republic” began defying it immediately. Now there is talk of secession — but any Yankee attempt to secede from the Confederacy would be met by war...
Eventually the riot fizzles out, allowing the celebration to begin. Interviewed by a reporter for Boston television, Willa explains: “Our aristocratic Bourbon friends down South and their Copperhead brethren around here managed to slip a little something into the United Corporations Charter, changing the Cartel’s Eugenics Program just a little bit. It seems some of them are so obsessed with the purity of their blood that they refuse to mate with anyone but their own siblings, like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. I must thank them, especially my ex-husband Henry Becket and his beloved sister Drusilla, for making this occasion possible.
“Mothers, it is now possible for you to marry your own daughters, at least in the Commonwealth of New England and other enlightened countries in the American Empire. There’s a whole horde of barbaric Corporate princelings trying to steal your daughters. If you see any chance they’ll take them away from you, marry them as soon as you can. That way you can keep them protected.”
Further north, in her place of exile in the wilds of Newfoundland in far northern New England, where she has fled to escape the state police, Drusilla Becket watches in horror as her nemesis willfully violates the laws of God and eugenics by marrying her own daughter. “This is horrible!” she cries out to her older brother Henry. “Can’t we do something about this obscenity, like destroy Boston?”
The Doctor steps into the living room, still fussing with his tie. “We can do better than that, Drusilla,” he says with absolute confidence. “We can deconstruct.”
Dru gets off the couch, stomps up to her brother, and stands on her toes to get in his face. She shrieks, “Did you see what that woman did, Harry?”
Henry frowns. “What did she do, Drusilla?”
“Your ex-wife is marrying her own daughter.”
“What?!”
22 june 2013...
Chairman Becket says to his brother the Doctor, “Now you’ve done it, Harry. You’ve created a monster.”
Henry Becket snaps back, “Don’t blame me, Richard! It wasn’t my brilliant idea to bring back the God-damned Confederacy! I for one never thought you of all people would lose New England!”
“Well, it’s gone for all intents and purposes, brother, just because — I can risk saying it now — the ‘damn Yankees’ still want to keep their precious ‘Boston marriages’ legal. And now your dearly beloved ex-wife is using your ‘purity clause’ to spread her insane idea of mother-daughter marriage all over the Empire! All because every redneck oil baron in Texas would be breathing down our throats? Well?”
“It was not about what you call ‘redneck oil barons.’ The Purity Clause isn’t for them. It’s for us.”
“Our family?”
“No. Our people. The best among us. The Remnant.”
“No, you cannot!” shrieks Richard Becket. “It’s not possible, it’s not moral, it’s not...”
“Fair?” mocks Dr. Willa Richter-Thomas, his longtime enemy. “I thought that word wasn’t even in your vocabulary.” She waves around a copy of the United Corporations Charter.
The Chairman storms up to her and leans down into her face. Even at 182 cm (about six feet in the British Imperial units the American Empire still stubbornly uses), Willa still looks short compared to the two-meter-tall Chairman. Yet she isn’t the least bit intimidated, so she doesn’t lean back; his nose touches hers as he stares down into her face. He growls, “No, I won’t let you.”
She smiles and shoves the Charter up into his face. “Seems here, Dick, that there’s a loophole right here in your Charter that allows just this. I can easily get any lawyer to cite you the chapter and verse of it. But if you read your American Constitution, you’ll find that any treaty ratified by the Senate and signed by the President becomes the law of the land, in effect part of the Constitution itself. That, as you well know, includes the Eugenics Program. The loophole, which your CEO friends insisted on putting in, allows anyone who is Incorporated to take any mate she pleases, no matter how dysgenic. Therefore, to put it bluntly, there isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop me.”
Chairman Becket throws up his arms and storms off away from his onetime sister-in-law. After five ragged paces, he turns back to her, points at her, breathes heavily as he stumbles for words, and finally says, “You know I’ll change it back, Willa. I’ll make it right this time.”
“And then your entire Eugenics Program will collapse. Yet keep it the way it is, and you’ll have every Corporate princeling in the Cartel at your throat in no time flat. And so I have every right to marry my own daughter. I have absolutely no intention of ever letting your sick toadies have my daughter for any reason whatsoever. Eugenics Program or no Eugenics Program, I intend to protect my dear Jennifer from you and all your kind. And so I’m making her my wife, and then I’m going to make love to her every day we remain married. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
21 june 2013...
boston common. Willa Richter-Thomas’ wedding dress is simple, but Jennifer Blair’s is exquisite. Jennifer looks like the beautiful angel people have been calling her all her life.
Drunk with ecstasy, Jennifer says, “I do.”
The Mayor of Boston says, “By the power invested in me by the Commonwealth of New England, I pronounce you husband and wife.” The huge crowd bursts into loud cheers. Before the Mayor can say anything else, Jennifer throws herself into her mother’s arms, and they kiss passionately. Mother and daughter are now husband and wife.
Outside the festivities on the Common, Willa’s enemy, the Prophet Drusilla Becket Pernell of Dictel, Incorporated, leads a huge crowd of politically connected evangelicals, Minutemen, neo-Nazis, and “God Hates Fags” cultists in a massive riot. Vice President Sarah Palin herself and other prominent Conservative Revolutionaries walked here arm-in-arm with Reverend “God Hates Fags” in support of “morality.” (Willa:“Pop quiz: What do Corpos mean by ‘morality’?” Jennifer: “Sexual fascism based on [air quotes] ‘traditional’ marriage arranged by Cartel-approved eugenicists [sticks out tongue in disgust].”) But when one of the Minutemen tried to assassinate Willa and Jennifer and was shot dead by a police sniper, the whole crowd outside exploded into mob violence. Vice President Palin and her entourage fled in their stretch Hummers, leaving the rest of the conservative crowd to face the riot police. Before the people inside can go out and dance in the streets, the police must clean up the Corpo riot. There’s no love lost between the Imperial authorities and local police.
In the nineteenth century, “Boston marriage” was a byword for de facto lesbian marriage. Then in 2004, eight years before the coup, Massachusetts became the first state in the Union to legalize same-sex marriage, making the old slang term a legal reality. After the coup, as President Goldman Sachs & Company reconstituted the Confederacy on the Union’s ashes, one of its first decrees was to forcibly merge all the New England states and former Canadian Maritime provinces into one state of New England, in order to limit the liberal influence the “damn Yankees” could have over what was in effect a victorious Confederacy. The new “Yankee Republic” began defying it immediately. Now there is talk of secession — but any Yankee attempt to secede from the Confederacy would be met by war...
Eventually the riot fizzles out, allowing the celebration to begin. Interviewed by a reporter for Boston television, Willa explains: “Our aristocratic Bourbon friends down South and their Copperhead brethren around here managed to slip a little something into the United Corporations Charter, changing the Cartel’s Eugenics Program just a little bit. It seems some of them are so obsessed with the purity of their blood that they refuse to mate with anyone but their own siblings, like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. I must thank them, especially my ex-husband Henry Becket and his beloved sister Drusilla, for making this occasion possible.
“Mothers, it is now possible for you to marry your own daughters, at least in the Commonwealth of New England and other enlightened countries in the American Empire. There’s a whole horde of barbaric Corporate princelings trying to steal your daughters. If you see any chance they’ll take them away from you, marry them as soon as you can. That way you can keep them protected.”
Further north, in her place of exile in the wilds of Newfoundland in far northern New England, where she has fled to escape the state police, Drusilla Becket watches in horror as her nemesis willfully violates the laws of God and eugenics by marrying her own daughter. “This is horrible!” she cries out to her older brother Henry. “Can’t we do something about this obscenity, like destroy Boston?”
The Doctor steps into the living room, still fussing with his tie. “We can do better than that, Drusilla,” he says with absolute confidence. “We can deconstruct.”
Dru gets off the couch, stomps up to her brother, and stands on her toes to get in his face. She shrieks, “Did you see what that woman did, Harry?”
Henry frowns. “What did she do, Drusilla?”
“Your ex-wife is marrying her own daughter.”
“What?!”
22 june 2013...
Chairman Becket says to his brother the Doctor, “Now you’ve done it, Harry. You’ve created a monster.”
Henry Becket snaps back, “Don’t blame me, Richard! It wasn’t my brilliant idea to bring back the God-damned Confederacy! I for one never thought you of all people would lose New England!”
“Well, it’s gone for all intents and purposes, brother, just because — I can risk saying it now — the ‘damn Yankees’ still want to keep their precious ‘Boston marriages’ legal. And now your dearly beloved ex-wife is using your ‘purity clause’ to spread her insane idea of mother-daughter marriage all over the Empire! All because every redneck oil baron in Texas would be breathing down our throats? Well?”
“It was not about what you call ‘redneck oil barons.’ The Purity Clause isn’t for them. It’s for us.”
“Our family?”
“No. Our people. The best among us. The Remnant.”
xbox field. In perfect unison, one thousand Corporates reach out to the sacred Flag in the legionary salute. Drusilla leads them in the Pledge of Allegiance, the Great Invocation of the American Religion.
In the stands, some are so overwhelmed by this tsunami of holiness that they lose all sense of self and cry out their ecstasy in the Unknown Tongue. Glossolalia spreads throughout the crowd like a fast-acting virus until they, the Intendeds on the field, the band and crew on stage, and even the legions of the faithful watching on television are on the ground, rolling, convulsing, glossolating the Invocation before it ends, masses of souls raped by the Holy Spirit, until only Drusilla, the channeller of gods, is left standing, her painted lips stretched into a smile of triumph.
(At nearby Union Station, Shira and Jennifer furiously work their phones’ keyboards and screens.)
No sooner than the dizzy Intendeds climb back to their feet, the cult techs lose control of their own giant screen; the waving flag and the Sign of the Dollar disappear, replaced by a red screen with a blue rectangle and attached black square. The rectangle says: “Spanner Presents SCREAM GEMS” in the rectangle, a white angry mask with crossed wrenches on the forehead. Drusilla spins to see it, a horror orchestra plays, the mask zooms hard into unstable extreme closeup, a Sam Kinison scream plays loud—
Mass panic! Terror-stricken mobs flee field, stage, and stands; blind fear makes them trample anyone who gets in their way. Drusilla’s horror turns to rage; she pulls on her hairdo and screams, “Spannnerrrr!”
At Union Station, people roll helplessly laughing on the platforms and miss their trains; Shira and Jennifer high-five. At Mudlark House, Drusilla’s four greatest enemies whoop and dance in victory.
on to the next... →Amanda: News flash! Spanner strikes again! The mysterious terrorist showed his face on the big screen at Xbox Field to sabotage a mass-marriage ceremony being held by Chief Shepherd Drusilla Becket. Eight people were trampled to death and nearly a hundred injured in the ensuing panic. COPCO Seattle Chief J. Cameron Becket has issued a statement.Chief Becket: We’re searching all the smelly corners of this city to track this terrorist down and put an end to his reign of terror.Amanda: We’ll have more on this as it comes in. Next, a giant robot goes berserk through the streets of Dallas — after this commercial break!
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[Revision 4 Final, 8/23/12: Flashbacks slightly edited to conform to Fourth Revision continuity. Everything else is new material.]
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