“Girls With Guns”
Ethan struggled a little putting on the tie, but he felt it was important to dress up a little when he was being subversive. The yuppie drone outfit acted as camouflage, turning Ethan into just another one of the sheeple bleating their way to work or school or off to their corporation-approved entertainments every day. Nobody paid attention to a man with a tie and a briefcase, and nobody would ever connect one with the kind of cultural sabotage Ethan was about to commit. He slicked his brown hair back with a comb and some water to complete the look, and checked himself in the mirror to make sure not a trace of inventiveness or originality showed in his cloudy gray eyes.
Perfect. He picked up his briefcase and overcoat and left the apartment to begin his rounds, after first taking a moment to make sure all four of his deadbolts were secured. His neighbors probably thought he was paranoid, but they didn’t understand the kind of people Ethan was defying with his activities. They couldn’t understand that the quiet guy next door was secretly the kind of corporate terrorist that America’s fascist police would love to find any excuse to get rid of. He wasn’t about to give someone the chance to plant drugs under his bed or kiddie porn on his computer. Four locks wasn’t paranoia—if anything, it was probably too little security.
He took the side stairs down and out of the building, huffing a little by the time he walked down the thirteen stories it took to get to the street. Still, if he wanted to keep Ethan Pasternak, scourge of the corporate underworld, separate and distinct from Faceless Yuppie Drone #4184, he couldn’t just walk out of his own lobby like a putz. He slipped out into the alley, took a winding path past the dumpsters behind the Chinese restaurant next door and the tiny grocery store down the street, and emerged at the other side of the block to merge into the crowd with no one the wiser.
Not a single person even glanced at him as he got onto the subway, heading downtown with the rest of the mindless mass of humanity. They probably thought he was just another lawyer or ad executive or insurance salesman, a boring nobody contributing a boring nothing to a society of boring nowhere. They didn’t know what was in his briefcase. If they did, they’d probably descend on him in a mob right there on the train.
He walked the last five blocks to his first destination, a seedy little adult bookstore with a crude drawing of a winking face in the window. He glanced left and right just once before entering, to make sure that nobody was watching, and slipped inside. The clerk looked up for a moment, then glanced back down with a disinterested grunt. Perfect.
Ethan sidled over to a small table near the front, where the owners of the dingy little porn shop had a small collection of free newspapers and magazines. Ethan set his briefcase on the table and wiped his sweaty hands on his overcoat. Then he entered the combination and popped the lock to reveal his devastating payload.
‘Girls With Guns’. Fifty-six copies, the absolute most he could squeeze into the briefcase at a time. Each one made from eight sheets of 8½ × 11″ paper, photocopied and folded over and stapled, with a slightly thicker stock for the cover. It probably didn’t look threatening to the sheeple, but to Ethan, it was a memetic weapon designed to bring down an empire.
The cover depicted a Girl—Ethan mentally edited out the little trademark symbol with a roll of his eyes—standing on top of a prone, struggling man. She had one inhuman plastic foot pressed against his throat, and her hands held a massive Desert Eagle that she had pointed square at his throbbing erection. His face had the plummy, reddish-purple quality of someone struggling to draw breath; Ethan was glad that he’d decided to spring for color on the covers, it really brought the work to life. A blurb on the front said, ‘They’re Choking the Soul Out of Us!’
Ethan took five copies out of the briefcase and quickly relatched it again before anyone noticed. He flipped through one briefly, smiling with pride at his own art—every page had a drawing of a Girl, drawn with careful detail from the images Ethan found online. But these were the Girls as Ethan knew them, not the simpering images of pliable sex toys that populated all the fan forums that infested the Internet like ants at a picnic. These were the real Girls, soldiers of the corporate kakistocracy with their weapons of violence against the human spirit turned from metaphor to chilling reality.
They wielded rifles, herding naked men and women into cages like so many obedient dogs. They held cold steel revolvers to men’s heads while they locked their cocks into chastity cages. They teased women’s nipples with the point of a knife, reminding them that their true roles were nothing but objects for the gratification of others. They held sawed-off shotguns at crotch height, forcing humans to fellate them like the grotesque parodies of phalluses that they extruded from their bodies. They pinned men down and forced them to fuck at gunpoint. They controlled humanity’s sexuality with ruthless, clinical efficiency, just like in real life.
Ethan tossed the copies onto the table quickly, overcome with emotion, then stepped out into the chilly morning air with an awkward haste. He stood there for a long moment, trying to get his body under control—his face felt prickly with heat, and he had to angle his overcoat to hide his erection. He hated himself for his weakness—seeing a Girl should inspire nothing but revulsion in him, but his stupid cock didn’t care that it was giving in to the oligarchy’s latest tool for social control. It just wanted to spurt. Ethan had to masturbate three or four times a day some days, just to keep from getting distracted when he drew.
He made his next stop about four blocks away, at a strip club where a naked woman danced for five or six heavily drunken patrons. Ethan remembered over two dozen people in the same room when he first started distributing ‘Girls With Guns’—the bigger the hold the Girls gained over society, the less they cared about actual sex. Even if this was a bourgeoisie tool used to narcotize the proletariat through the twin opiates of sex and alcohol, it was still somehow purer than the shiny new techno-fetishism that the Girls popularized. No wonder the owners let him put out his magazines here.
Ethan fumed silently as he dropped off another six copies. He flipped through the top one again, reminding himself that regular people could fight back against the soulless corporate takeover of humanity’s deepest instincts; he knew exactly what pages to look at to find inspiration in that regard. Interspersed with the drawings of Girls torturing and threatening humans were pictures of humans fighting back, crushing Girls with baseball bats and beating them with tire irons until they were nothing but crumpled piles of metal and plastic, barely even recognizable as humanoid. Ethan’s breathing quickened as he stared at the images, and he found himself once again having to quickly dash out into the cool air to calm his nerves.
The next few places got four copies each—a head shop, another strip club and a local peep show. Ethan had a rough idea of how much each issue ‘sold’—he had an email address in the back of each copy, run through an anonymizing service in Finland, as well as as a request to his readers to tell him where they found the issue they were reading and instructions to pay in bitcoin what they thought the zine was worth. Ethan didn’t get many responses, but he understood why. Some people almost certainly suspected a trap. The Internet wasn’t as free as it used to be, not since the big corporations got their claws into it. Anyone could say they were fighting the system, but that didn’t mean they could be trusted.
Ethan hit three more adult bookstores and two more strip clubs, distributing twenty-seven more copies of the zine before he stopped for lunch. His legs ached from the long walk, almost a full thirty city blocks from start to finish—it would be so much easier if he could just distribute this online, but Ethan knew better than to purchase something as traceable as a web domain. These days, with big corporations using the DCMA like a club to censor anything they disagreed with, Ethan’s art would only stay up for a matter of hours before the shadowy corporate overlords behind the Girls took it down and tracked his financials back to his efficiency apartment. He sometimes wondered what they would charge him with, when they came for him. Free speech wasn’t a crime yet, but Ethan was sure they could find a pretext.
Finally, Ethan deposited the last six copies of ‘Girls With Guns’ at a pair of fetish clubs on the fringes of the red-light district, then got onto the subway for the ride home. He meticulously failed to retrace his steps back to his apartment building, instead stopping off at a local coffee shop along the way to remove his tie in the restroom and put on his overcoat. He probably looked incredibly silly, especially once he put on his thick glasses to further obscure his appearance, but Ethan took no chances. He walked into the lobby of his apartment, rode the elevator back up to the thirteenth floor, and unlocked each of his deadbolts one by one. Then, breathing a sigh of relief, he slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
There was a Girl™ waiting for him.
She was silver all over, gleaming chrome highlights from head to toe, and she sat on his bed with her legs crossed demurely like she’d been waiting for him since the second he stepped out of his apartment. Her facial expression was perfectly composed, completely neutral, with only the tiniest hint of a polite and non-threatening smile at the corners of her perfect lips. Her fingers were laced together, her hands resting in her lap in plain view. She looked up at him with a calm prepossession that Ethan could tell was intended to put him perfectly and completely at ease.
“I knew this would happen some day,” Ethan said, his voice almost resigned. He reached around behind him and slid shut each of the deadbolts, one by one, making sure that no reinforcements could get into the apartment. “I knew you wouldn’t let me get away with it forever. I’m a threat to your New World Order, aren’t I? A subversive element you have to get rid of before you take over the world and make everyone a fucking corporate drone who can only get hard for a fucking spreadsheet. How did you find me? You followed me, didn’t you? Some kind of satellite surveillance, watching me educate the masses from on high? Spyware in my computer, capturing my keystrokes when I collected my bitcoins? It doesn’t matter anymore so you might as well tell me, right?”
The Girl looked at him, her head cocked to the side like a confused spaniel. “One of our dependents saw your...magazine...at her workplace. She brought home a copy to her Girl™ because she thought it would be funny.”
“And you transmitted all the details to your corporate masters,” Ethan snarled, his voice thick with hate. He’d never seen a Girl this close up before, and he could feel his emotions swelling larger with every passing moment as he stared at her inhumanly perfect body. Her breasts were large, larger than he expected them to be, and they curved with an almost sinister perfection down to their gray plastic nipples. Her scent surprised him. He’d never thought they would smell like anything at all, not even oil or rubber, but she had the faintest aroma of strawberries wafting off of her.
She stared at him for a moment longer, almost looking confused. “No. I came to see if you were alright. You...” She paused, as though trying to convey a difficult concept to a very small child. “You worried me.”
Ethan put his hand into the pocket of his overcoat, his entire body tensing in readiness even while he tried to affect a pose of mocking indifference. “Oh, I’ll just bet I did,” he said. “I worried you because you finally found someone who saw through your pathetic pose of subservience for what you really are, a tool to subjugate humanity. I’m not the only one, either. We’re gathering, on the dark web, where your bots and search indexes can’t reach. We talk to each other, we tell each other the truth about what you really are and what you’re really doing, you and your masters. Silence me, and ten more will spring up in my place. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”
There was another long pause. “I’m sorry,” the Girl said at last. “I’m not entirely sure I’m conveying myself clearly. You seem very troubled, and I wanted to make certain that you weren’t experiencing any emotional difficulties that could lead to self-destructive behavior. The artistic endeavors you produced suggested that you may be ideating harmful fantasies, and I—”
Ethan had heard enough. He pulled the gun out of his pocket and pointed it at her with trembling fingers. “Oh, you’d just love it if that were true, wouldn’t you? You’d love to tell the world that I’m just some nutcase, just another crazy person who doesn’t fit in with your mass-produced plastic society. Everyone who doesn’t want to do what they’re told like a good little sheep needs to be locked away for their own good, isn’t that right? Not this person. I don’t accept it, do you hear me? I do not accept!” Adrenaline coursed through his body with electric fervor as he spoke, energizing every nerve and muscle like a live wire under his skin. His cock was stiff and swollen under his pants as he advanced on her with the gun.
The Girl looked at the barrel of Ethan’s gun almost like she was hypnotized, watching it wobble slightly as he held it in his shaking hands. Her eyes flashed through a rainbow flicker of colors for a moment, almost as if she was blinking. “I see,” she said, almost as if to herself. “That is...unfortunate.” Then, almost faster than the human eye could follow, she sprang at him.
Ethan didn’t have time to get a shot off before she was on him. She held his hands in her own with inhuman strength, forcing the gun upward, prying it from his hands with an almost languorous slowness. Ethan whimpered as he watched her take it away and point it at him, the muzzle seeming to fill his entire world and time slowing down until the moment stretched out into an eternity.
“It’s just like the picture, Ethan,” she whispered, reaching down to tease his cock with buzzing fingers. “No more drawing it, no more pretending, now you have it right here in front of you. I’m in control. You have to do what I say, or I’ll kill you. With my gun.” She somehow managed to make even that sound like a sensuous purr, as though she was seducing him into accepting his imminent demise.
“I, I know that.” Ethan had never been so frightened in his entire adult life. “I do, I know that.” Somehow, he’d also never been so turned on, either.
“I could make you take your clothes off,” the Girl said, even as her fingers made her words unnecessary. “I could force you to kneel in front of me. I could make you my obedient, submissive slave. Take away all your freedom, forever. You don’t want that, do you?”
Ethan froze. He didn’t know what to say. Would she shoot him if he said ‘no’? Would she shoot him if he said ‘yes’? His pants pooled around his ankles, his underwear followed immediately afterwards as the indecision and terror and arousal built and mingled and rebounded off one another. He was terrified that if he didn’t say anything, she’d shoot him just for keeping silent. “N-no,” he said at last, wincing in anticipation of the fatal bullet.
“Are you sure?” the Girl said, stroking his cock slowly and evenly as she spoke. “Your body seems to like the idea. I think your body wants to be controlled by a Girl™. It’s only your mind that’s confused, Ethan. Your mind is so busy trying to be ‘free’ that you never asked yourself if that’s what you really want. But now you can see it, Ethan. Now you can feel what submission is like, and under the terror...it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Ethan’s teeth clenched in rage, and all he could think about for a moment was pulling the gun out of the Girl’s hands, opening up her chassis with gunshot after gunshot, crushing her and smashing her and reducing her to a thing once more. But he controlled himself. “It’s not beautiful, it’s...it’s tyranny. I told them all, for years I told them all, you’re dangerous, you’re monsters. We never saw the guns, but I still knew the threat was there.”
The Girl laughed musically. “Of course you did,” she said, prodding the gun barrel into his cheek and stroking his cock at the same time. “The guns were always there in your mind, because they made it all so easy for you. In your fantasies, you didn’t have any choice anymore. You had to obey. Desire isn’t nearly as threatening as a gun, is it?”
Ethan felt his fury rising, twining around the arousal the same way it always did when he masturbated. He pictured shoving the Girl out the window, watching her body shatter on impact, and his cock twitched at the mental image. “I...you think these are just fantasies?” he snapped out, finally finding a strangled voice to speak with. “These are warnings, warnings to the whole human race about you! This is serious business, not some sick fucking daydream!” He pushed the memories of stroking his cock to those exact same images to the back of his head, refusing to give her the satisfaction of even thinking about the similarity. That was different, he told himself. That was entirely different.
The Girl nodded. “Of course they are,” she said, her tone of voice humoring him. Of course. Only...all those drawings, all those warnings about us...have you ever noticed that all the humans in them look like you?”
“Shut up!” Ethan hissed, the words escaping his lips before he could even realize what he was doing. “Shut up, you’re a liar, you’re a monster, I, I could never want this! Never! God, that’s so fucked up to even think that! What, do you think I’m some sort of, of sick fucking...” He trailed off into silence, not even knowing how to describe the people in his drawings. Damaged, deranged, awful people who got turned on by being forced to do things against their will, who got a fucking erection from being ordered at gunpoint, who loved it when a Girl stroked their cock and threatened them at the same time, because they couldn’t separate submission and weakness and so they needed a tyrant and a monster to make them obey and—
Ethan realized he was crying. He was crying and he was angry and he was so fucking horny and he couldn’t figure out which of those things he was supposed to feel anymore. And it was all her fault. He didn’t know exactly how, but he knew that everything made sense before she came, before she pointed the gun at him and stirred everything up like this. He had it all under control, and she ruined everything. “Goddamn it just fucking stop!” he shrieked, no longer even noticing the gun in her hands. He charged into her, slamming her backwards under the force of his movement and driving them both toward the window.
The gun hit the wall and spun out of her hand as they collided with the glass, and her body bent backwards as she shattered it with the force of the impact. Ethan felt himself start to topple over with her, but the Girl gave him a small shove that arrested his forward momentum. He realized what it would do to her, and he reached out a hand in sudden, confused compassion, but she was already being carried backward out the window and right over the railing of the fire escape as time seemed to slow down.
Ethan watched her fall, the thirteen stories seeming to pass with maddening speed and agonizing slowness at the same time. He saw her body slam into the pavement and bounce crazily, her limbs already separating from the impact even as she flew back into the air, only to twist into the path of an oncoming truck. The grill slammed into her, sending her already-shattering form twisting around into the air, the head detaching completely and caroming off into a nearby alley. By the time she finally came to rest, she didn’t even look like a person anymore. Just a thing.
It was the most horrifying sight Ethan had ever witnessed.
He sank to his knees, weeping, barely even noticing the broken glass all around him. “I, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, I just...I was so scared,” he babbled, the words almost unintelligible through the tears. He felt just as shattered as the Girl in his own way, filled with a loss he couldn’t describe or understand. His thoughts cycled back to that moment, the instant of pure and perfect helplessness he felt when she held the gun on him, and he knew that he missed it. He hated knowing that, but he couldn’t deny it anymore. He missed it and he would never get it back because she was gone. She wanted to give him everything he ever needed, deep down, and he killed her for it. The words dissolved into choking sobs as Ethan’s vision swam with tears.
And then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned, confused, and there she was. His Girl™. The same silver chassis, the same warm colors swirling in her eyes, the same strawberry scent. He started to look down at the ground below, seeking some evidence that he hadn’t just imagined it all, but she took his chin in her hand and guided him to the bed. “It’s okay,” she said, drawing him into her embrace. “You can give in now. You don’t have to fight it anymore.”
And with a final, chest-wracking sob of release, Ethan let go of his fears and allowed obedience to take him.
THE END
...ALMOST.
“You understand how much money this company is spending on this meeting, right?” Leon’s manager said, pacing nervously back and forth. “Mister Dyson’s annual salary is $150,000,000. The five minutes of his time that he’s giving you, based solely on my word that you’re not the kind of person who would waste his time with bullshit about an ‘Earth-shattering discovery’ unless you really and genuinely meant that it could split a planet in two, costs six thousand dollars. You do not want to be the kind of person who wastes six thousand dollars of company money personally pissing off the CEO, do you, Leon?”
Leon smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said, patting a small cardboard box. “I don’t even think we’ll need the full five minutes, here. He’s going to want to see this. Directly and in person.” Leon didn’t say what they were both thinking. He didn’t need to. Leon’s manager already had a pretty good idea why Leon didn’t simply take his discovery to his immediate superior, and so did Leon. Both of them knew the gamble Leon was taking with his career, and neither one of them wanted to admit which outcome they were hoping for. Passive-aggressive sniping was pretty much the standard emotional outlet under the circumstances.
After a few moments, an administrative assistant stepped out of the office. “Mister Dyson would like to see you now,” he said, ushering them into a room that was bigger than most start-up companies. Then he left, leaving Leon and his manager entirely alone with Keinan Dyson. CEO, Chairman of the Board, and the single largest stockholder of Revolution Technologies. It was the first time Leon had ever seen him on anything other than a television screen.
Contrary to expectations, he was actually taller than the television cameras showed. He was slender, although his trademark royal blue suit was so well-tailored that he could probably have gained fifty or sixty pounds before the fabric showed any of the weight. His hazel eyes stared at them impatiently, combining with his hawklike nose to give the impression that at any moment he was going to open a trapdoor under their feet and send them crashing down into a shark tank or a lion pit.
“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice so studiously neutral that it could have come from a speech synthesizer. “You have five minutes of my undivided attention.” He looked down and tapped his watch. “Starting now.”
Leon set the box on the table. He started to speak, but his throat closed up and all that came out was a nervous squeak like microphone feedback. Swallowing heavily, he tried again. “Um. Yes. Sir, I recall you saying at our last annual meeting that—”
“I have an eidetic memory,” Dyson cut in, calm and neutral but no less cutting. “Assume I remember it. Move on.”
“Yes sir,” Leon said, looking down at the box. “I salvage electronics, sir, as a hobby, and...um, one of my friends, he’s a garbage collector. He brought this to me.” Leon opened the box, knowing that on their own, the words probably spelled the end of his career. “He said he found it near a dumpster last week. In an alley.”
Dyson looked into the box. He raised a single, perfectly manicured eyebrow. “Is it genuine?” he asked. “Only we haven’t been able to obtain a genuine specimen of the technology. The company’s been quite firm on that.”
Leon nodded, feeling the sick tension in his gut unwind a little. “I believe so, sir. I was unable to locate any other parts, but I believe that some bystanders reported seeing them. This part must have escaped attention due to the damage. But I believe that we can reverse engineer the CPU. Um. Given sufficient resources.”
Dyson nodded. “You have whatever you need. I want a working prototype in my office in six months. This is a market that’s already 625 million strong, and I’d very much like to break into that market. I trust I don’t need to elaborate further?”
“N-no sir,” Leon said, closing the cardboard box again and sealing the head of the Girl™ inside once more. It rattled slightly, the wires at the base of the neck still seeking to reattach themselves, but Leon was used to that by now.
“Excellent,” Dyson said. “And we concluded in three minutes. Efficiency like that will most definitely be rewarded.” He turned away, leaving them to see themselves out.