EthicalDative

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/10/03/claw-hammer/)

Claw Hammer studied a handful of prehistoric photographs preserved in the Museum of Ancient Technology. “Why do barbs ape-grin in the pografs?”

Siddhartha Huff processed the uppity punk’s patois for a moment. “Where did you learn about apes?” he said, more to himself than to Claw. “Apes did not grin. Maybe that’s why they’re extinct,” he retorted aimlessly. “Well, barbs did, and they are, too,” parried Claw.

The allusion to barbarians — the dead races — startled Sidd. The Pandemiad, the ancient chronicle of the horrors that had decimated bipedalism, was heavily redacted by the governor. Unvarnished history would only stoke restiveness in the lumpenproletariat. Isthmia’s origin story was garlanded evangelically with doughty ranchers and perky frontier wives conjured from the epistemic hubris pulpits of the Alamocracy.

Sidd learned belatedly that Claw Hammer was a black bean — i.e., surreptitious member — of a ding gang roaming the warrens that styled itself the Freeholies. The low-born pack of fact freaks scavenged scraps of truth from the steaming silicon dumps and pieced them into haphazard realities in their noisome gaming dens.

Sidd enjoined Claw Hammer from further contact with the Freeholies. “Whore don’t gotta love it, just gotta do it,” he thundered in dingo over Claw’s protestations. Dressed down in his own dialect, the ding burst into tears and returned a sneer of acquiescence. The matter was (it seemed) closed.

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/09/15/le-coeur-a-ses-raisons-que-la-raison-ne-connait-point/)

*From the charter of the Rhipidistian Society.

The end of lunation 247.457627-12 matched about twenty douzains of the Old Reckoning. No one was quite sure how to label the new chronology, but it felt like more than a routine vibration in the cesium of Isthmia’s atomic clocks. The house of Huff Pugh Fuchs was entering an indeterminate decade of the Uncommon Era. That was what counted. Time kept passing successfully, and the duchy under the current Montmorency — number XIV — was stoked to celebrate itself.

The hallmark moment marked persistence: first, that of the Montmorencys in sitting their dynasty’s impotent throne; first, that of the Mamasutras in perpetuating efficient privilege; first, that of Isthmia Inc. in wresting perpetuity from the scoured barrens of a dead hemisphere; last, that of the ding warrens whose organs fed the transplant mills in the mansion district.

Normally, the prospects for a donor on an organ farm biding his date with Texas cologne when a recipient surfaced would have been humdrum. The donor about to be mentioned, however, was no ordinary ding. You recall the “Adopt a Ding” promotion mentioned several figments ago? Siddhartha Huff had duly chosen a random ding to coddle symbolically like the rest of his peers.

But rather than relinquish the juvenile to whatever his fate portended when the promo period expired, Sidd elected to stealthily groom his adoptee for a shocking purpose, one referenced glancingly heretofore, to be snatched from the shadows of allusion hereinafter. The upcoming Heritage Ball, designated the “Lunation Gala,” would prove to be more climactic than even this writer had supposed.

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved