The bitchin' times of Canine Experimentation and Female Conditioning

Ears to Hear

Kilike had fallen through.

Shakti followed him now, as he wound his way through the backsteets of Wells City. He had found Shakti there, too, and was bringing her to the others. They reached a beslimed and decaying meshwork of cheap attempts at fencing, that hid the back end of an overgrown something, which Shakti realised, had once been a park. The enclosure and the extrasocials were within.

It had begun with another of the many “efficiency for beneficence “ schemes sweeping through Spina. Kilike had been fired from pillow company, Resthead, and after his redundancy, he had rejected the reeducation and reallocation offered to him; turning instead to a nightly anaesthesia of gin and fleshly indulgence. Withdrawing to the erased and forgetting backstreets of Wells city, he was intrigued by services provided by the Utopian Women who had colonised the area. Why they had left their Utopia was unclear to him, even now. Such immigrant populations always struggled to fit into society, and were often found lingering like this, forced to turn to any trade they could. He was jaded by them now. He realised, it was like eating fruit slightly too late, when the fungal hyphae were still invisible. The look wasn’t compromised before the parasite had blossomed into a saprophytic rot. But the taste was lost.

“We’re here. These, are the others.”

Kilike lead Shakti to an opening. The extrasocials sat there, squatting disconsolately on damp logs lying amid the leafmould and photodecaying plastic of the disused park. They sat, around the dying embers, and Kilike began tracing the changes in society. A strange tale it was, too.

He explained how how noone had noticed. When Norton had come into power, he spoke and the propaganda had flowed from his mouth, lingering invisibly in the air, to be breathed in and grow silently in vivo until it was too strong. It overwhelmed the body, slowly secreting more and more of its symptoms out into society, onto the sickening society, and it was too late. The watchers were the only ones who knew, but they only knew that it was too late. The turning point, Kilike told them now, as he knew he had to, had been in the closure of RestHead.

It was a pillow company, closed for inefficiency, and now remodelled to produce a new, and “safer” orthopaedic pillow. Five sixths of the staff had been recycled to other sectors of society, and the company now needed less than one man, to produce a pillow per second. The research behind the safety of the new pillows had, of course, been conducted by Norton himself, and they had quickly and completely replaced the traditional kind across the whole of Spina. Norton had falsely proclaimed these pillows to prolong Spinatorean lifespan by up to 8 years, as they supposedly properly supported the characteristic, unfused cranial bones of the population. Shakti and the other recusants heard now in horror, that in fact, the pillows acted to tighten the skull around the brain, dangerously rechannelling cerebral connections, and so limiting the capacity for free thought.

Kilike read their faces and paused. He looked around. The people here had no use for pillows. They laid their heads on bare ground when and wherever tiredness took over. They surrounded him here in the park; the immune. Prostitutes, gypsies, beggars, radicals; free spirits and lost souls. What could he do with them, and how long could they hide?

He continued. Norton had just introduced YellowPoints and Freizeit Clubs. They were another medium of control. You attended the Clubs to smile and to socialise, but were also informed and educated about society. Yellow people were to be yellowly rewarded, as was only appropriate. Kilike thought to himself now; over time, faces would crack from smiling, they would gather in nervous laughter while their progress was scrupulously tracked through Yellowpoints... benefits for good behaviour. But it would never be enough.
If a particularly propitious woman produced a new child, she was considered very yellow indeed and might get an upgraded kitchen; but if a man attended too few meetings, he would lose YellowPoints, and yellowness, and then somehow, turn fatally pale…

Shakti just listened, and watched, using her blanket of black hair to guard her. She was thinking that the nullmen would find them here, eventually, and she was afraid. They would null out all that they could see.

As though reading her mind, Kilike forced on. The nullmen were part of Norton’s reparative conditioning system, for the elimination of social anomalies.They had been born when Norton had studied Rebière, a forgotten scientist who had long ago proposed a widely discredited Canine Theory. Now, Norton argued that although the genome was proven to be in closest relation to primates, psychology itself, was more similar to that of the canine family. A complex of arrogance and dependence was how he saw his populace, and he was ruling them accordingly.

Silence now fell among the extrasocials, but they had heard. They had watched, and they knew.





Months passed. Norton went to bed on his finest down and duck stuffing. Christmas. Ageing population. So neat. So well-behaved. Free of thought the women spooned their christmas soup onto the bread plates. The senile old mother on the edge frowns. She spoons her soup with a concentrating fork. Norton watches.
Faces search for those remembered social patterns. A smile, an intent, listening gaze, a nod here, “oh yes, how lovely”, “how are you?”, “marvelous”. Shakti stares. Confusion. Her mother forking away. She asks “would you like some help with that?”, “wonderful”. Now her chest cracks. She forces herself upon the 40 year old hard worker. Takes the fork behaving like a spoon, and replaces it. The woman looks confusedly upon the real deal. Her daughter guides the spoon to her mouth. Does she know?
A mind going blank. Does it go black? Can it come back?
Shakti wonders. Does the body remember those over-used expressions? Do the muscles remember their social programming, or are those the imprints that are etched most strongly into the brain? A social being, her mother. And now, the social framework falls apart. Vacant expressions never seemed so vacant. Why did she use that pillow? Listen. Do you hear? Communication. She followed the social norm. Now she is trapped. She was programmed to fit in. Now she is blank. Where does the mind go? Does it go?
Shakti knows. She looks at her mother, sitting smiling at the television. No idea what is on it. The extrasocials know, they see. The pillow users become senile. Dementia. Social control. Norton is happy?
She asks Kilike, how he is. “I’m fine.”

Eloi Renor's Royal Growth

Eloi Renor suddenly noticed that the red markings on the back of his neck had turned into a beard. The stubble was thick and left an inch wide gap between it and his lower hairline. His first thought was that he might have a testosterone imbalance, or that his psychological confidence issues were compensating to make him feel more masculine. Even if well-intentioned, he thought, neither of these options were at all calming. At least his Aeslan hairstyle and the high swung collar of his royal cloak covered his neck completely. For the moment, he tried not to worry about it.