Progressively Ever After
This is fiction. Because it hasn't happened....yet.
Marcus was tired of staring at the stainless-steel wall, but the ethics attendant had instructed him to sit and wait.
Attendant. Right. A rose by any other name.
He sat at a cheap plastic table with a matching chair under ominous, suffocating lights, trying to figure out why he'd been summoned. Sure, he'd shown poor, careless restraint when checking in at the Bureau, saying, “What's this about?” But that was after the summons.
At a desk sat an un-large person with no intentional gender marks, but Marcus was raised in the Era of Assumptions, so he still had trouble avoiding social constructs. In his time, they would have been described as a small man.
But maybe Marcus was in for a lucky day, for the less than averagely sized, testosterone-weighted greeter seemed unperturbed by Marcus’ words.
There'd been two other humans in the room with him. Both looked more Traditionalist than Humanist, but one could never tell, so Marcus kept to himself.
Eventually, a vertical, trad-physical attendant with long, absence-of-absence-of-colors hair appeared. They scanned their clipboard and said, “Marcus? Please follow me.”
Their smile was beautiful, but to publicly deign it so would be a micro-aggressive act of toxic masculinity, so Marcus just nodded, but as he stood he blushed from self-awareness of a dormant, Cro-Magnon attempt to evince virility.
He followed the attendant into a drab room with a chair and table, and his heart sank when they pointed at a plastic chair and told him to wait, but he did his best to feign otherwise. Disappointment was dangerous. This sucks, he thought. Everything’s banned!
It was hard to track time without a clock, so he didn’t know how long it took. But eventually he'd sat long enough to believe it had been five minutes, one hour, or seven days since he'd been left alone. Finally, a trad-male attendant with no other specific qualities entered with a smile. “Good evening, Marcus. I’m Bob. I’m here to help you.”
He must be the good cop. “Uh, um, hi.”
Bob slouched against a wall, an act of recently legalized, trad-gender behavior.
“Don’t they give you a chair?” Marcus asked.
“Sitting affects my GSE,” Bob said, smiling.
Marcus imagined another trip to an ethics education camp in order to prevent his eyes from rolling. Concepts like GSE irked him, but “Global Self Esteem” was a thing, and not just any thing, but THE thing on all sponsored media.
With another human in the room, Marcus could track time better. So it was after thirty breaths passed before Bob stopped smiling and said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Don't you want to know why you're here?”
“The SJB summoned me.”
“Yup. Exactly.” Bob didn’t have a watch, but he reflexively looked at an empty spot on his left wrist then rubbed his eyes.
“Look, I don’t know why I’m here, but I do know that I had to reschedule a lot of things to be here, so—” Marcus cut himself off. Be polite. Ethics camp.
“Ha!” Bob’s smile returned. “We don’t get a lot of trad-trads here. You’re like a real throwback. How fun. We studied you at the Academy.”
Marcus took no offense from the inappropriate yet legal allusion to his aging process, but it was strange to see a young citizen use one, especially at a government job.
Bob leaned in after conspicuously glancing at a spot on the wall. “Can you…”
He seems afraid of the camera? Marcus thought.
“Can you tell me what it’s like to…I mean, have you ever, did you ever, um...like use combustibles chemically activated by temperature?”
This was all any kid cared about, Marcus thought with a smile. Hearing stories about the savage trad-world, a place where people categorized, judged, intoxicated their bodies and minds, and partook in all sorts of other primitive behavior that oppressed and victimized humanity. So "Bob" wanted tales of the brutal life of yore?
Marcus raised his eyebrows. “Can I have one?” He was careful not to name the thing.
Bob’s eyes narrowed. “I wish. They were allowed for trads like you, until the new Justice Coach banned them for triggering nostalgia.
"Good call," Marcus lied. He had a funny feeling about Bob and wanted to test it.
"Yeah," Bob continued. "Like, imagine if someone smelled it then remembered a loved one or a friend, or even a celebrity they admired who suffered from the effects of inhalation of combustible material that is chemically activated by temperature and addictively harmful. Even worse, it could trigger memories of how humanity used to buy, sell, advertise, and profit from products that supported patriarchal capitalism.” Bob’s eyes grew wide and innocent. “I still can't believe you had to work for pay, and that you even had a word for it!”
Bob must have passed his exams with a high score. His nomenclature was precise and he seemed to effortlessly understand and embrace The Progress.
He put a finger in the air and coughed into his elbow. “Sorry, Marcus. We’re off task. I’ve been unduly selfish. Let's return to our purpose. Why are you here?”
"I don't know."
"Sure you do. C'mon. Just tell me. Why are you here?"
Marcus frowned. It lasted a second, but happened, and Bob and the camera saw it.
Bob leaned forward. “Well, now you did it."
The long-haired attendant from before entered the room and Marcus reflexively smoothed his hair. He was attracted to them, especially their maternal look of concern.
Bob gave the attendant an official smile then turned to Marcus, saying, “Blake will take over now.” Then, as he left, he blushed— evidence of shame and deceit, but also apology, and Marcus wished him well.
“Hi, Marcus, I’m Blake. I’ll be assisting you now. Can we get you anything?”
Their concern did not seem entirely official, and Marcus liked that. And why not? He wasn't actually conditioned. He was just faking it. So he could admit, at least to himself, that his biology wasn't mistaken. He was attracted to Blake, and he didn't care if that was wrong. He still didn't understand this social prerogative. It wasn't like he was going to act on it. Not to mention that the attendant looked younger than him. That is, if he still subscribed to false concepts like aging, an imperial attempt to categorize, label, and other to belittle.
“Hi, Blake.” Marcus said. But then, it happened. Despite his best efforts, he blushed—evidence of shame for desiring fornication—and he again felt trapped by this paradigm. On the one hand, the one he'd grown up using, he knew that he wanted to have sex with Blake. However, on the other, newer, ethics-education-camp trained hand, he'd learned and thus knew that his thoughts of lust were the result of systematic, social programming designed by the one percent to keep the population misdirected from Oppression Awareness.
Based on their age, Marcus reasoned Blake had been conceived at the end of his era, but raised in The Progress, so they'd never lived in an anti-progressive society.
***
Blake had actually been raised by her trad-grandmother, Nana, who’d faked their way through The Progress with well-concealed trad-stoicism. Nana, fervently dedicated to a starkly different opinion of humanity, had told Blake all about her Russianheritage, using inappropriate concepts like handsome and attractive to describe her family, despite their supposed potential to damage her granddaughter’s mental health. She’d even once explained the power of sex appeal.
Somewhere, in a dark, bad place, Blake had stored these forbidden concepts, and Marcus’ presence now tugged at those suppressed, threaded memories.
