The Emperor's New Golf Course

It was his seventeenth birthday...his coming of age day

He watched his Dad punch another golf hole into the park grass, then place a small orange flag to mark the hole. He was amazed that, once again, nobody noticed that his Dad was making a small golf round in the park. Of course, nobody used the parks anyway; as pretty and neat as they were.

His Dad, Big Joe, looked back at him in amusement.
“Come here, you need to see this. It’s long past time you saw this.”

He led him over to the cadre cafeteria, and threw a handful of midsized rocks against the sheet window. Not only did they bounce off without effect, but nobody inside seemed to notice.
“Cmon, let’s get lunch”

He protested as his Dad walked in and started towards the counter

An old man, obviously weak, and dying of some illness, was holding a cup of water, and smiling at him. He recognized the old man as a senior cadre from the netwave, but he also from somewhere else, from some familiar but forgotten past. He also noticed the old man was smiling at him in pride, and holding his cup out.

Big Joe nudged him,
“go ahead and get him some water”

He took the cup of water and refilled it from the pitcher as the other cadre seemed not to even know he existed at the table.
The old man said
“have a sip, drink with me”

He could barely refuse the great man’s request, and felt the pride coming from the dying man as he took a small drink from the refilled cup. The old man smirked,
“To the emperor’s new clothes”
“Now sit in the corner and practice your kata”

He took a table as far from everyone else as he could, as out of sight as he could, and began a punch and counter drill.
He was moving far faster then he had ever had in his hourly practice, and was amazed when the table itself seemed to begin to accommodate his movement.
The table seemed slow at first, and got in his way, but soon adjusted it’s speed to match his kata.
He then saw the other’s in the cafeteria began the same seated kata

Soon the loudspeaker came alive with the sound of Steve’s voice. Steve was the most beloved of the cadre.
“All cadre in cafeteria C54, please stop your tai chi and wait”

He began looking around for Big Joe, but Big Joe was nowhere in sight.
Soon, the cafeteria was filled with Senior cadre, unsmiling but wise men.

“Who began the kata?”

No one spoke up but he could feel almost the entire crowd motion towards the table he was at.

Steve himself was at his table then, and Steve, all smiles,
“Now young man, let’s go talk about where you learned that”

They were at his apartment, suddenly and in a blur, himself and Steve and some wizened advisors, and yet he had the realization that it wasn’t his apartment, because at his apartment, there were things to hide, things he had never acknowledged before. Steve locked the door from the lookers-on and hangers-about, and began the Spell of Beguilement.

He reacted more then thought about it, and used a Subtractive Subliminal to avoid the attack.
Steve's spell took the form of a surprise punch, and his own swallowed this attack into his own hand,
The spells countered each other
He sensed the next attack to be a Subtractive, and so used a Additive, and these attacks too canceled each other before they took effect.
The next series of attacks were both Additive, and he knew then that the “spells” were nothing more then logical restraints on how he was seeing things.

He KNEW he was in a kata, physically.
Then he knew he was in an actual physical fight with Steve.
As he blocked down Steve’s next punch, which he had seen as an Additive spell, a subliminal mind trick, a moment before, a flash came into his mind, and he saw his own fists as they really were, covered with callouses from Iron Hand training.

The knowledge that he was actually fighting Steve seemed to speed his body, and in a further series of flashes he realized he had spent long hours of training in actual fighting technique, not the mandatory hour of tai chi he had previously “remembered”.
And as these thoughts flashed into his mind, he further saw Steve as a washed out street tough.

His own attacks on Steve began to strike and he saw the fear in Steve.
Steve turned to run, and the concept of self-hypnosis flowed into his mind.
“All this time, and I’ve been tricking myself”

As Steve fumble with the lock to escape, he drove his elbow into the back of Steve’s head.
Steve went to the ground, and he finished the jobs with his boots.

He caught his breath, and saw things as they really were, and not how he had tricked himself over his whole life.
He had been taught as a small child that some things were really bad, and he had been taught as a very small child how to “not see the bad” through the use of self-hypnosis.
He also saw that Big Joe had trained him in open hand fighting since he was a small child as well, that Big Joe had taught him how to avoid certain restrictions of the self-hypnosis.

Now he was not at all cogent of the way the hypnosis worked, how it was codified, or what a Level 7 trigger was, but he knew that the phrase
“the emperor’s new clothes”
had freed him.

This brought back the dying old man in the cafeteria to mind: and truth shocked him. The “dying old man” had been a bull like man in his early 50’s in perfect health.
He had seen him as dying because he knew the old man was committing suicide by giving him the phrase
“the emperors new clothes”

And he saw the bull holding him in his lap as a child and whispering away the fears of the self hypnosis, saw the bull crying as he turned his son over to Big Joe for training, and he saw that the bull was his own father.

He knew they were going to kill his father.

He opened the door and “saw” that the wizened advisers were really four street toughs, chavs. He went at them, for somehow he knew that all they knew of violence was beating up people who had deluded themselves into weakness. They went down quickly.

Maybe not quickly enough.

He ran back to the cafeteria. His father was not there. Big Joe was not there. None of the chavs were there, so he was able to choke out the location of Disposal Unit C-87 from one of the Senior cadre lolling about.

And he wanted to prevent his father from being disposed. Now that he knew who he was, he was desperate to spend time with him in his pride.
At the least, he wanted to say goodbye.

But the slackjawed man in the dirty blue coveralls at Disposal Unit C-87 blankly told him “the furnaces had been fed, and them what left the package” had left three minutes ago.

He saw, and picked up a bloody iron rod from where one of the chavs had let it drop, and caught up with them.

After crying for the loss of his father, and for Big Joe, he realized that he was alive, that he felt real.
“Am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am a man? “

He saw people strolling past now, not as sexless matrons and diffident men, but as scowling or defeated or confused men and as short, tall, sexy, or ugly women.
And as the rush of his physical power had caught him up earlier, now the need for touching one of those women caught up to him

One woman caught his eye; she swayed her hips more extravagantly then she would have in a society that allowed her natural inclinations to be acted on. She was lush, the kind of woman that lived for making love, and making babies. He caught her by the hand, looked her in the eyes, and said
“The emperors new clothes”
She looked down, then up at him through the tops of her eyes, and he led her by her hand to a private place.

Much later on, after the crying, and the lust, and the emotions he had never felt before, he was a smart enough man to extrapolate the concepts of “failed society”, and “failed bureaucracy”. In the meantime, the rage he had never learned to control often guided him, and although he knew he could not fix society, he could tear down what did not work. He did not know of the concept “gun”, but the phrase “gunlocker” seemed to be associated with a key he kept in his apartment, and he was absolutely sure that there was a waveflic associated with the key that Big Joe had hidden for him that would explain all what “gunlocker” was about.

He had already started the thing that would do the most damage, however, as the lush woman, who had enjoyed the pain as part of what had happened, and seemed to know that it would not be painful in the future enjoyed her fourth and fifth men. She decided that she needed to do that once more before she was too sore to quit for the day. She walked up to a man, bullchested to her now though previously she would have seen him as skinny and repulsive, wrapped her arm around him, locked her hip against his, and whispered to him
“the emperors new clothes”
as her hands slid down the front of him

she got what she wanted.

and the the emperor's new clothes were placed on citizens as a sickness spreads, from one to another, but it was not sickness but wellness that was now flowing through society

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