[Original Novella] The Beautiful Ones, Part 4

^{source
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3}

“Let him go, Mark.” Sarah advanced on him resolutely. He blocked her way, brandishing a spear he’d fashioned by sharpening a mop handle. The second group cowered behind him, looking unsure of what to do. Andrew’s thoughts about all of this, having percolated until now, finally coalesced into a plan.

“Mark. Your beef isn’t with Hugh. It’s with me, isn’t it?” Mark flinched, but said nothing. “Look, I don’t know anything. I was just running my mouth. But you already knew that, right? There’s so much beauty and wisdom to the scriptures, I’m sure there’s got to be something to it all.” He looked confused, then suddenly angry. “Do you really think that’s going to cut it? That you could come here, sweet talk me and I’d join your herd of obedient statist drones?”

It was unclear what he meant by that. Andrew realized Mark hadn’t yet seen them vote, and in his mind there was no other possible structure than the one he’d forced on the second group. Anything seemingly different was, to him, some sort of ruse. “Look, we’re scared. You’ve got us where you want. Just tell me what you’re after.”

He subtly straightened his posture and puffed out his chest, then began listing demands. “You’ve built some nice shelters. We’ll be moving into those. Your people can even stay if they build their own additional shelters, but not you. You’ll be banished like I was.” Of course he’d actually banished himself, but it was hardly the time to say so. “Why not let us help you build your own?”

This didn’t satisfy him. “Yours are next to the only bathrooms.” For the first time Andrew noticed the various buckets lined up along one of the shelving units and surmised what they were for. That made sense of the stench, at least. Andrew sighed. “We can’t just give you our homes. Isn’t there something else I could do to make things right with you?”

Mark mulled it over. Then narrowed his eyes and smiled. “Kneel before me, and confess.” Andrew puzzled over that until he clarified his meaning. “Confess what you already know to be true, deep down. That Christ is Lord, and all man made governments are corrupt.”

With a new avenue now open to him, Andrew didn’t hesitate, falling to his knees and saying what he desperately hoped would do the trick. “Truly, I renounce my allegiance to Earthly government, and affirm from the bottom of my heart that Jesus died for our sins and was the son of God.” Mark appeared profoundly satisfied

Then, the woman in the hijab called out from behind: “...And Muhammad was his final prophet!” Mark abruptly pivoted and shouted at her. “NO! Muhammad was a fraud and a pervert, misled by demons!” Khayrah steeled herself and set to arguing. “If you mean because he married Aisha when she was young, where in the Bible are such unions forbidden? Did not God come unto Mary and make her heavy with child when she was but fifteen?”

Mark sputtered indignantly, creating an opening for Khayrah to press on. “And it is written in the holy Qur’an that when Muhammad pointed to the Moon, it split in half! How can you explain that unless he was a true prophet of God?”

Mark now found room to get a word in. “Of course it says that in a book written by followers of Muhammad for the purpose of convincing people to become Muslims! None of that ever actually happened!”

Khayrah looked wounded and increasingly angry. “Oh, but Jesus walked on water? And multiplied bread and fishes, and healed the sick?” Mark snapped back that of course he did those things, as it says so right in the Bible.

“What, then, of the fulfilled prophecies?” Mark laughed. “Simple tricks! Most were recorded long after the fact as having been fulfilled. I can do that too! Say I were to tell you that ten years ago I predicted we’d wind up in this PriceCo. Am I a prophet? The rest are all stuff that’s vague enough to be true in any era.” Khayra asked if that was not also true of the prophecies in the Bible. Mark scowled, then insisted that was completely different.

While they were distracted, Andrew snuck up to Hugh and untied his bonds, gesturing to the second group not to alert Mark of it. He soon noticed they were all staring at something and turned to see a freed Hugh standing among Andrew and the rest. “As ever!” he cried, rage boiling over. “The God hater and the raghead conspire against me! How fucking surprising!”

There’d been no such collusion, but again, it wasn’t the time to say so. Mark seemed ready to throw himself at Andrew for a moment, but after sizing up the first group he instead ran off into the vast maze of shelving towers leaving the second group frightened and bewildered. “We had nothing to do with it! He took your man on his own!”

Khayrah pleaded for forgiveness but was quickly assured by Sarah that they knew full well who was to blame. “He must’ve told you all sorts of terrible things about us.” She nodded, relating that he’d claimed they were cannibals. Sarah joked that veganism precludes cannibalism. Andrew then chimed in. “If it ever comes down to that, I know who I’m eating first.”

With the ice broken, the second group rapidly integrated with the first. Aside from Khayra, there was Ernesto, Wanda, Natasha, Jordyn, Ralph and Domingo. With tensions now defused, they were all welcomed to come join the settlement and begin constructing their own shelters. “What about Mark?” Khayra inquired. “Fuck him, let him go stew on his own” Sarah said. “We have more than enough people now, it’s no great loss.”

With everyone assembled, Andrew presented the folders he’d found. Stunned silence followed his recitation of the research log. “So it wasn’t demons after all. Some kind of twisted science experiment.” Fran objected that it could still be demons, just ones who perform experiments on people. “No, not demons I think” offered Khayra. “Perhaps Jinn. They are known tricksters.”

Fran laughed. “Jinn? Don’t be ridiculous, there’s no such thing. It was obviously demons.” Just as the two seemed on the verge of fighting, Andrew stepped in. “Could be both. Demons and Jinn! Betting on what happens to us. Or neither! Is that really important? We just barely avoided being pit against each other. Let’s not do it to ourselves.”

It proved effective. Andrew felt pleased with himself. Ever since the stairwell he’d been trying to work out how things went sour with Mark, and how to prevent reoccurrence. It seemed like everybody’s got some sort of personal indulgence that they want validated. Something they know is a trespass, either against rationality, social norms, or some other establishment. Some aspect of the world intimidates, injures or humiliates them, so they seek refuge in denial of it.

If you submit to their desire for validation, you become a wonderful person in their eyes. One of the good ones. Somebody who “gets it”. If you don’t, you’re just another one of the ‘sheeple’. Monsters, kuffar, muggles, heretics, statists, shitlords or whatever else.

That small concession, to step into their fantasy and live it with them if only for a moment, is how you signal to them that you’re on their side. That you mean them no harm and unreservedly accept them, idiosyncracies included. A principle Andrew suspected must be intuitively obvious to everyone else, but which he was only now discovering.

“The way I see it”, he continued, “We could give up and try to make a go of it in here. But now we know how that turns out. I dunno about you but that’s not how I want to spend the rest of my life. Gorging on processed foods, living in a shelving tower, growing fat and disaffected. They’ve given us too much, knowing it will destroy us. That we’ll destroy ourselves.”

The rest nodded in silent agreement. “Or, we could focus all our resources on breaking through the barrier. There’s enough of us now that if we really got serious about it, we could be through in a year, maybe less. That’s what I vote for. I’m not a rat in a maze, for some sicko playing God to gawk at. Alone or with help, I’m getting the fuck out of here!”

Ernesto, Hugh, Ralph and Domingo shouted excitedly, some thumping their chests. Jordyn, Khayra and the rest cheered. There was a vote anyway, as many in the original group had grown accustomed to it. At first, it was proposed that everyone take a shift hammering at the wall. “That’s problematic” Melissa griped. “The men are more muscular and can keep at it longer without tiring out.”

Andrew asked if this meant that some people perform more or less effectively at certain tasks than others. She scowled and said something about socially constructed expectations causing men to exercise more. “I don’t want more work just because I stay in shape” Ernesto complained. “How can you call that fair? Fairness is when everybody gets treated the same.”

Melissa disagreed, defining fairness as everyone being assigned as much work as they can handle, and receiving as much as they need. Domingo pointed out that there’s a difference between fairness and justice.

“It doesn’t sound just to me either though. That would be everybody doing as much as they can, and receiving a proportional reward. If we all get the same reward but some of us have to work much harder, why should we?”

“Because it’ll get us out of here”, Andrew reminded them. “I might be willing to work harder” Ernesto began. “...If some of the finer ladies here cut me off a piece in exchange.” He wiggled his bushy eyebrows and laughed as the women lambasted him for suggesting such a thing.

Khayra in particular found the notion repulsive. “Absolutely Haram!” she cried, face turning red despite her complexion. She pulled the opening of her hijab tight until only her worried eyes peered through. “Don’t worry Khayra, we’re not doing that” Andrew affirmed. “Women are equals here.”

Melissa frowned, then spoke up. “What, because you say so? We need a cishet white male to declare us equal?” Andrew heaved out an exasperated sigh. “Fine then, you’re in charge. What’s your first decree?” Everyone turned to Melissa, who looked at the ground and fiddled with her fingers for a bit before muttering “Women are equals here.”

“What about money?” Ernesto suggested. It was swiftly pointed out that with no access to the outside world and an abundance of free goods around them, money was worthless. “Not if we lock up the really nice shit. Top shelf booze, smokes, porn mags, that sort of thing. Then we save up money from working and buy what we want.”

Melissa described the existence of such magazines as gross and problematic, and worried aloud that the whole scheme sounded distressingly Capitalistic, but everyone else voted for Ernesto’s idea. So it was that Ernesto and Andrew collected every scarce luxury and locked it away in the office.

There wasn’t enough cash on them, collectively, for the plan to work. Nor would anybody assent to using some other object as currency since there was just too much of everything and too many places to find it. But upon busting open the cashiers, there was ample money inside.

Based on the total amount, prices for various items were determined, and the makeshift economy was born. As the goods were finite, it was agreed money would be burned, locked away or otherwise taken out of circulation once spent. It was not a comprehensive, sustainable system but didn’t need to be.

It served a singular purpose, to motivate hammering. Which it did. The rate of progress steeply increased with the introduction of an incentive which rewarded everyone proportionally to the amount of work they put in.

Everything seemed to be moving along like oiled clockwork until the first theft occurred. Domingo erupted from his shelter one night, shouting angrily. When the rest gathered around him he claimed that fifteen dollars had been taken from his stash. His outrage rapidly spread as the prospect of the fruits of their labor being stolen frightened everyone, most of all those who’d put in the most work.

Tensions increased when Ernesto began following Jordyn around all day, performing what he seemed to believe was an infallible seduction routine. When it didn’t work on her, he moved on to Sarah. Then to Khayra, who was least receptive by far. As the days wore on he grew more and more aggressive in his advances, and when Andrew confronted him he threatened violence.

“If you want to go find Mark and join him, you’re welcome.” Ernesto walked right up to Andrew, chest to chest, face inches from his and asked who would make him leave. Within a few minutes Andrew had gathered the rest of the men save for Hugh and the most abled bodied women. “Oh you’re real tough like that. Can’t take me man to man so you gotta team up, right?”

Andrew shrugged. “I’m uninterested in simian posturing. You’re making some of the women feel uncomfortable, and I have to take the whole group’s needs into account. I know it’s been some time since you got laid. That’s true for everybody. This place doesn’t exactly set the mood for that. We’re all scared, just banding together so we can get out. Don’t be the guy who makes it worse.”

Ernesto wiped his forehead, mulled it over, then began muttering apologies. He was, at least, not so intractable as Mark. Even put in double shifts on the barrier over the next few days in an apparent bid to make good with everyone. During that time, many meetings were held to discuss what should be done about theft, stalking and whatever else.

It was decided that three teams consisting of one man and woman each would patrol the shelter area day and night. Their numbers were determined so that each pair could sleep for eight hours before their next 16 hour shift came up. It gave many of those not physically suited to hammering something productive to do, and a way to earn money.

Jeffrey seemed to take to it immediately. “This is just like Tokyo Private Police!” he gushed. Melissa, his partner, muttered that she’d never heard of it. “As an uncultured gaijin, of course you haven’t. Tokyo Private Police is among the finest examples of a superior art form called Japanimation by some, or “Anime”. Melissa went on about how he was culturally appropriating this or that, but he was too busy ranting to listen.

“In the future of Tokyo Private Police, the famous Ginza district has become a hotbed of crime. Noriko and Kayoko, partners with very different backgrounds, join the titular private police force inspired by traumatic encounters with crime in their youths.

To stand a chance against the criminals of Ginza, they must pilot police mechas! Which of course Yasuo has much more interest in than women, even though Noriko’s body is highly erotic.” He snorted.

“The scooters are like our mecha units, you see. We could encounter criminals at any time. Practice constant mental readiness like Noriko, and we may yet prevail.” Melissa looked horrified and did her best to bury herself in her hoodie, though Jeffrey took no notice of it.

---

^{Stay Tuned for Part 5!}