Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 21: High School Banned
Part 1: No Leaders for the New Revolution (Final Revision)
Part 1: No Leaders for the New Revolution (Final Revision)
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson
School’s out forever...
Alice Cooper Youth Enterprise League
in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson
School’s out forever...
the wave subsides
the beat ceases
the music turns ambient and fades away
the dancers become fewer, fall asleep with exhaustion, leave altogether
but the few hardcore enough to remain as the rain begins to subside find places on platforms, in the stands, or in the sheltered hidden areas beneath the stands to follow the pulse of their pounding heartbeats and surrender to the love energy and make passionate love, beautiful partners drawn together no matter who they are, like the couple at the center still annihilating themselves in each other in absolute sexual delirium until the
dawn when the sun peeks through what’s left of the clouds and the rain subsides, the dancers disperse, the crews begin breaking down the equipment, and the last of the Bremelo party find themselves being taken away by their tired sober friends on the road away from Bangor on the journey toward
25 october 2014.
home. where they settle in, take turns bathing, still not yet come down from the stratosphere, still not remembering who they are and who they made love to, and the
brushes take off dead skin once drenched with rain water and now dried, soapy sponges and special soap smooth their skin again and remove the last traces of mud, they shampoo each other’s hair, use their hands while rinsing off the remaining soap simply for the pleasure of touching each other, take time drying each other’s bodies with thirsty thick towels, and those who cannot find volunteers who can do it for them
and even while bathing they find themselves languidly kissing, touching their tongues together, drifting into bed together on the futons scattered across the floor, so many soft lips touching, so many hands softly caressing each other’s skin, impelled by E-injected pure love and the pounding beat that no longer sounds but which their hearts continue, changing partners, changing genders, inverting positions front and back and to 69 and back, drinking deep from each other’s still supercharged genitals, driving each other to sweeter ecstasy while the E still lasts and the golden disc outside smiles on them warmly through the window as the welcoming weekend begins but they don’t notice on the edge of dream and waking and they miss
the dawn transforming into a vivid new reality never before experienced by consciousness so young, dreaming with the intensity of drug trip or mystic vision turning dream bodies fluid and transparent united by a wave of love so pure and intense they can no longer tell where any one of them ends and the others begin or that their soul is even distinct from the world, seven dreamworlds fused into one, time stopping to capture a fragment of eternity in a single instant yet propelling them into
the morning: the birds sing prettily, the sun smiles warmly through the windows, seven beautiful young women wake up and stretch and caress one another as they find themselves in the king-size bed in the cluttered spare bedroom of the
penguindrome. a strange house filled with strange relics of a strange culture Charmian has never seen before: exotic idols collected for their exotic beauty and left unworshipped, exotic instruments made to play exotic music like what’s playing beyond the closed door, exotic art covering the walls, exotic furniture, exotic fabrics, computers toys and instruments in various states of disassembly, the intoxicating scent of incense, nothing familiar but the structure of the bedroom of a small-town house with no bed but only futons and the gorgeous nude girls, some once her enemies, who made love to her all night in a mind-blowing Ecstasy-fuelled lesbian orgy, the thought of which still escapes her rational comprehension.
Shira. Kira. Jennifer. The girl she used to mock as “Leela” but who now has no name. Someone she has never met but who seems to recognize her. And... Julian?
She sits up. Her own sister embraces her from behind. “Please don’t...”
“It’s too late,” says Julian in a tone full of both adoration and remorse.
Charmian feels her face blush hot. Her eyes go wide. “You didn’t.”
Julian is near tears. “I did. Please forgive me.” She rests her head on her sister’s bare shoulder, kisses her neck, and cries.
She feels herself not in this world. She goes dizzy with absolute culture shock. “What in the world is this place?”
Jennifer puts her arms around both sisters and kisses them both, offering herself as an Alice to serve as their guide in wonderland. “This is the world my mother and I were born in, the world your grandfather recoiled from. Welcome to the world of the Rockers.”
“I thought you were a scientist.”
“So? I’m as good a musician as my mother.”
Charmian looks at her, then looks around the room. “You’re no more mundane than I am. Why do you even care about mundanes?”
Shira embraces them from the other side. “They don’t dedicate their lives to stabbing each other in the back, for one thing.”
“Stasis,” Jennifer adds. “Your world’s so cold and formal and rigid. It’s all hierarchy and competition. When I found myself in your world, I took the first opportunity to return to mine.”
Charmian looks at the girl with the violet eyes. “A world where women have no names?”
“Where free women can choose to have no name,” the girl replies.
“There’s cultures more conservative than yours,” Jennifer explains, “that don’t allow women to have names. Ancient Roman and Chinese patriarchs gave their daughters just the family name. The Caliphate bans names for women and animals altogether, but names weapons.”
“Isn’t patriarchs owning our names the same thing?”
“Exactly! Normals are free from that, if they don’t aspire to aristocratic corruption.”
“And,” Shira adds, “if the big men don’t decide to own the little people’s names, which of course is the entire Conservative Revolution.”
“What’s the real freedom, Charmian? freedom to own others, or freedom from being owned?”
“Know the answer to that question, and you’ll know why we fight.”
Charmian and Julian look at them: Jennifer, the twins, the girl with no name. This is their world, but these two girls have nowhere else to go. They look at each other and nod in a silent resolution to follow these strange young women down the rabbit hole to see how far it goes.
The last girl groggily moans and stretches. Liz McPhail, hoverboard racer with anarchist reputation, a complete mess hardly recovered at all, struggles to get up and open her eyes. She takes over a minute just to focus her eyes on the women sitting together on the futons beside her. Then number three recognizes number one and thinks she’s seeing double. “Oh no, you didn’t...” She throws herself back on her futon and hides in her blanket. They can’t help but laugh. Shira lies down on her, hugs her, and kisses her cheek.
They assemble in the dining room downstairs for breakfast. The E has finally worn off: they turn lethargic and surly from the drug’s crash. Charmian and Julian sit together, stare at each other’s naked bodies, realize that they have no clothes, remember what they somehow did last night, and blush deeply. Liz reveals she’s suffering from the same culture shock as the Fleer sisters: “Why don’t you guys ever put any clothes on?”
DJ Alex Plus, co-owner of the house, turns out to be quite pretty under that weird Styler fashion. She winks at Liz. “Only barbarians wear clothes in the house.”
Most of the girls spend the afternoon making up for lost sleep, but Charmian and Julian stand before each other and stare in fascination at each other’s naked bodies and blush. Alex puts a gentle hand on each sister’s shoulder and smiles. “This is new to you, but eventually you get used to it.”
Charmian asks, “You’re comfortable being naked all the time?”
“When you learn to be comfortable in your own skin, you wonder why clothes are even necessary.”
Julian asks, “Are you okay being naked in front of your own sister?”
“Jen and I are completely comfortable with each other, so no problem at all.”
She pulls her sister into a tight embrace. The girls tremble in each other’s arms. She kisses Charmian’s cheek.
“You did it, didn’t you?” Both sisters nod nervously and blush deeper with embarrassment and shame.
Charmian says, “Everything’s new. I don’t know what’s up or down. I lost my parents and my home, I’m in love with Shira and now my sister’s in love with me, and my life’s turned completely upside down.”
“Like a revolution?”
The sisters turn to her in wonder. Realization comes over them. They nod enthusiastically. “Exactly!” Charmian turns to face her sister, holds her tight, gazes into her eyes, and gives her a long sweet shy kiss that makes them both blush furiously and shudder. They giggle together. She strokes Julian’s beautiful long dark brown hair.
Alex puts her arms around them and whispers conspiratorially, “If you really do love each other that much, you can get away with it here.”
They stare at her in astonishment, then at each other. “We can’t be. Are we?”
Julian buries her head in her sister’s shoulder and blushes deeper. “Yes we are.”
Charmian blushes even deeper. “Oh my god we are!”
“Christie won’t like it.”
“She hates us already. We don’t need her. We’ve got each other.”
Julian raises her head to beam brightly. “Yeah.” She kisses Charmian with all the emotion she kept dammed up in her heart all her life; Charmian surrenders to her sister’s kiss; their bodies melt together...
mudlark house. Officially it’s a dinner party to celebrate their Team Challenge victory, still so shocking to the respectable world, catered as usual by Mobster Mike’s; but everybody in the know thinks of Team Bremelo as the Tournament champions of the Bangor High Student Union. They come by car, van, bus, bicycle, and foot, students and tutors and faculty advisers, crowding into the huge living-dining room at the house of their friend and hero Jennifer Blair to discuss their plans for the week and a half before the election that CPMC vows will never happen. This being officially an official Team Bremelo victory celebration, the team’s female nudefighters wear their “team uniform” of fighting gloves, fighting boots, and nothing else, much to the amusement of some and the annoyance of others (Jennifer: “It’s how we are, so you’ll have to get used to it”). Fuyumi Tachibana asks, “Aren’t you girls in danger down there?”
“Daisy and I have actually killed female terrorists by kicking ’em there,” Jennifer replies, “so we had to find a solution so it doesn’t happen to us in a fight. Naturally, we settled on Shira’s solution.”
“What’s that?”
“Sawed-off dildos.” Fuyumi blushes and slinks away.
When the actual dinner is over and Willa gives the signal, the meeting begins. The furniture has been moved out of the meeting area so the Bremeloes can sit or kneel on the ground in the inner circle, teachers and some Student Union members can sit in the surrounding chairs, and everybody else stands outside. “It’s the ‘round table’ principle,” Willa explains. They look at Sparks in his black duster suspiciously as if he’s a possible spy, but he says, “Spy? For the Police Guild rank-and-file, yeah. Not all of us are high-paid mercenary enforcers who love our job too much. Too many of us are paid peanuts and treated like shit. Besides, somebody needs to sniff out the real spies.” He glances at Shira; she winks back.
As vice president of the Student Union Organizing Committee acting as president in Karen’s absence, Colette stands in the center (in full school uniform) to preside over this planning meeting. “First order of business,” she says, “is how we’re going to successfully hold Friday’s march without Karen.”
Shira says, “Plan B, of course.”
“But we didn’t plan a Plan B,” says Polly. “Everything was supposed to revolve around Karen.”
“And Falconer knew it and tried to take her out,” Jennifer adds, “even getting her lover on the Fearsome Foursome involved.”
“And killed,” Connor reminds her.
“Which means Karen in the hospital throws a wrench into Plan A. Therefore, Plan B.”
“I say having any leader at all’s Plan A,” says the girl with the violet eyes. “We pick a leader, they’ll inevitably find out, and then we pick a new one and it becomes a vicious cycle. Single point of vulnerability, remember?”
“Exactly! Which means we need to stop following the leader and do things democratically instead.”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” says Sparks. “Don’t we need somebody to coordinate the thing?”
Willa puts an arm over his shoulder. “You’ve been playing around in the Corporate sandbox too long, Jim.”
“What do you mean?”
Jennifer stands up to explain. “When Bloomberg bought New York from bankrupt Trump after the original Spanner Incident, he said the city needs, and I quote, a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ to bring it back. He was only stating the universal Corporate belief in the Leader Principle. It always works against us so-called ‘mundanes,’ the workers and students. It’s the reason the unions died and we got stuck with Corporatist dictatorship. The solution — and it’s especially important you bring this back to the Police Guild — is worker democracy, the only kind that works.”
“Aren’t you a Professional yourself? What about the Science Guild?”
Willa says, “Give me a day sometime and I’ll tell you all about the peerage system.”
Sana looks at her puzzled. “Don’t you mean ‘peer review’?”
“The dirtiest secret of the Science Guild centers on the meaning of ‘peer.’ It doesn’t really mean ‘equal’ like it still does in America, but ‘titled aristocrat’ like in Britain with its House of Lords. The Science Guild grew out of the Royal Society of England, which was founded by English gentlemen, who built the British peerage into the Guild’s ‘peer review’ system. That became the model for all Professional Guilds, and now the Labor Guilds. That’s the archaic neofeudal system we’re trying to end. Oligarchy is the disease, the cure is democracy.”
“That means no leaders,” Shira says, “otherwise, they win and we lose regardless.”
Courtney stands up. “Shira, won’t all we do is bring in a horde of gangsters wanting to beat us up?”
“That’s what Team Bremelo’s for, remember?”
Ken asks, “What if Falconer or Ross sends a hitman with a helicopter?” The nameless girl clears her throat, smiles at him, and winks. “Oh yeah.”
Lorine asks, “What if they hire those ‘Men’s Rights’ maniacs?”
“Same answer as question one,” says Shira.
Mimi asks, “What if there really is a spy here and they find out everything?”
“Then why don’t we do the Shira thing,” Sparks replies.
“Uh, ‘Shira thing’?”
Shira looks at him. “You mean flash mobs, right?”
He winks. “Bingo.”
Kira says, “So instead of following a leader, even Karen, we’re crowdsourcing leadership like we do on the Darknet and even incorporating Plan Z? That shoulda been Plan A in the first place.”
“Except Karen,” reminds Shira.
“How’d she get to be supreme leader of everything anyway?” asks Steve.
“Her Buddhist group incorporates the best leadership training seminar in the Eastern world. You wanna be a Gandhi, King, or Mandela? Just follow President Yamamoto, sensei to leaders.”
Jennifer crosses her arms. “Did they really do anything lasting? Like India worships Hitler now and South Africa’s the murder capital of the non-Muslim world. Social justice comes only through the collective action of ordinary people.”
“Thus no leaders.”
Lorelei asks, “What was ‘Plan Z’?”
“Expect the unexpected, and act accordingly.” Shira winks.
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[Revision 4 Final, 3/28/12: Original scenes heavily revised for Final Revision continuity; new scenes added to lead in from 20.3. Original title simply “No Leaders”.]
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